How can I generate an ObjectId with mongoose?

I'd like to generate a MongoDB ObjectId with Mongoose. Is there a way to access the ObjectId constructor from Mongoose?

• This question is about generating a new ObjectId from scratch. The generated ID is a brand new universally unique ID.

• Another question asks about creating an ObjectId from an existing string representation. In this case, you already have a string representation of an ID—it may or may not be universally unique—and you are parsing it into an ObjectId.

You can find the ObjectId constructor on require('mongoose').Types. Here is an example:

var mongoose = require('mongoose');
var id = mongoose.Types.ObjectId();

id is a newly generated ObjectId.

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Note: As Joshua Sherman points out, with Mongoose 6 you must prefix the call with new:

var id = new mongoose.Types.ObjectId();

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You can read more about the Types object at Mongoose#Types documentation.

You can create a new MongoDB ObjectId like this using mongoose:

var mongoose = require('mongoose');
var newId = new mongoose.mongo.ObjectId('56cb91bdc3464f14678934ca');
// or leave the id string blank to generate an id with a new hex identifier
var newId2 = new mongoose.mongo.ObjectId();

I needed to generate mongodb ids on client side.

After digging into the mongodb source code i found they generate ObjectIDs using npm bson lib.

If ever you need only to generate an ObjectID without installing the whole mongodb / mongoose package, you can import the lighter bson library :

const bson = require('bson');
new bson.ObjectId(); // 5cabe64dcf0d4447fa60f5e2

Note: There is also an npm project named bson-objectid being even lighter

With ES6 syntax

import mongoose from "mongoose";

// Generate a new new ObjectId
const newId2 = new mongoose.Types.ObjectId();
// Convert string to ObjectId
const newId = new mongoose.Types.ObjectId('56cb91bdc3464f14678934ca');