Intro to Mongoose Defining a Model

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will be able to create and export a Mongoose model.

Getting started

When working with Mongoose, it’s good practice to store model definitions in a dedicated models directory. Let’s create that directory and a file for our todos model.

mkdir models
touch models/todo.js

💡 Model files are always named singularly.

In models/todo.js, we’ll want to accomplish the following:

1. We define a schema.
2. Compile the schema into a model.
3. Export the model.

Define a schema

First, import mongoose into our models/todo.js file:

// models/todo.js
const mongoose = require('mongoose');

Next, we’ll define the following schema:

const todoSchema = new mongoose.Schema({
  text: String,
  isComplete: Boolean,
});

Compile the schema into a model

Next we’ll want to compile our todoSchema into a model:

// models/todo.js
const Todo = mongoose.model('Todo', todoSchema);

Reminder: Models, not schemas, contain the functionality to perform CRUD on a MongoDB collection.

Finally, we’ll export our Todo model, so that we can access its various model methods throughout our application:

module.exports = Todo;