Insert Documents

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Insert a Single Document
Insert Multiple Documents
Insert Behavior
Learn More

The MongoDB shell provides the following methods to insert documents into a collection:

To insert a single document, use db.collection.insertOne().
To insert multiple documents, use db.collection.insertMany().

The examples on this page reference the Atlas sample dataset. You can create a free Atlas cluster and populate that cluster with sample data to follow along with these examples. To learn more, see Get Started with Atlas.

Insert a Single Document

db.collection.insertOne() inserts a single document into a collection. If the document does not specify an _id field, MongoDB adds the _id field with an ObjectId value to the new document. See Insert Behavior.

Example

To insert a new document into the sample_mflix.movies collection:

use sample_mflix
db.movies.insertOne(
  {
    title: "The Favourite",
    genres: [ "Drama", "History" ],
    runtime: 121,
    rated: "R",
    year: 2018,
    directors: [ "Yorgos Lanthimos" ],
    cast: [ "Olivia Colman", "Emma Stone", "Rachel Weisz" ],
    type: "movie"
  }
)

insertOne() returns a document that includes the newly inserted document's _id field value.

To retrieve the inserted document, read the collection:

db.movies.find( { title: "The Favourite" } )

To ensure you return the document you inserted, you can instead query by _id.

Insert Multiple Documents

db.collection.insertMany() can insert multiple documents into a collection. Pass an array of documents to the method. If the documents do not specify an _id field, MongoDB adds the _id field with an ObjectId value to each document. See Insert Behavior.

Example

To insert two new documents into the sample_mflix.movies collection:

use sample_mflix
db.movies.insertMany([
   {
      title: "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom",
      genres: [ "Action", "Sci-Fi" ],
      runtime: 130,
      rated: "PG-13",
      year: 2018,
      directors: [ "J. A. Bayona" ],
      cast: [ "Chris Pratt", "Bryce Dallas Howard", "Rafe Spall" ],
      type: "movie"
    },
    {
      title: "Tag",
      genres: [ "Comedy", "Action" ],
      runtime: 105,
      rated: "R",
      year: 2018,
      directors: [ "Jeff Tomsic" ],
      cast: [ "Annabelle Wallis", "Jeremy Renner", "Jon Hamm" ],
      type: "movie"
    }
])

insertMany() returns a document that includes the newly inserted documents' _id field values.

To read documents in the collection:

db.movies.find( {} )

Insert Behavior

To learn more about the specific behavior of inserting documents, see Insert Behavior.

Learn More

To see more examples of inserting documents into a collection, see the insertOne() and db.collection.insertMany() method pages.
To see all available methods to insert documents into a collection, see Additional Methods for Inserts

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