Mongoose JS findOne always returns null

I’ve been fighting with trying to get Mongoose to return data from my local MongoDB instance; I can run the same command in the MongoDB shell and I get results back. I have found a post on stackoverflow that talks about the exact problem I’m having here; I’ve followed the answers on this post but I still can’t seem to get it working. I created a simple project to try and get something simple working and here’s the code.

var mongoose = require('mongoose');
var Schema = mongoose.Schema;

var userSchema = new Schema({
    userId: Number,
    email: String,
    password: String,
    firstName: String,
    lastName: String,
    addresses: [
        {
            addressTypeId: Number,
            address: String,
            address2: String,
            city: String,
            state: String,
            zipCode: String
        }
    ],
    website: String,
    isEmailConfirmed: { type: Boolean, default: false },
    isActive: { type: Boolean, default: true },
    isLocked: { type: Boolean, default: false },
    roles: [{ roleName: String }],
    claims: [{ claimName: String, claimValue: String }]
});

var db = mongoose.connect('mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/personalweb');
var userModel = mongoose.model('user', userSchema);

userModel.findOne({ email: '[e-mail]' }, function (error, user) {
    console.log("Error: " + error);
    console.log("User: " + user);
});

And here is the response of the 2 console.log statements:

Error: null

User: null

When the connect method is called I see the connection being made to my Mongo instance but when the findOne command is issued nothing appears to happen. If I run the same command through the MongoDB shell I get the user record returned to me. Is there anything I’m doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.

Answer

Mongoose pluralizes the name of the model as it considers this good practice for a “collection” of things to be a pluralized name. This means that what you are currently looking for in code it a collection called “users” and not “user” as you might expect.

You can override this default behavior by specifying the specific name for the collection you want in the model definition:

var userModel = mongoose.model('user', userSchema, 'user');

The third argument there is the collection name to be used rather than what will be determined based on the model name.