Alternatives for connecting MongoDB Atlas to Heroku Node.js app

Question

I've been working on a simple website using node.js, express, and MongoDB, with Heroku as the platform. I had a lot of issues early on trying to connect to my MongoDB Atlas cluster, resulting in Heroku throwing request timeout errors.

After some googling, I surmised that the issue was that the IP addresses Heroku sends requests to my DB from weren't whitelisted in Atlas. The simplest solution at that point was to egregiously set up so that any IP is considered whitelisted. Which actually works fine currently.

My actual question comes down to the fact that whitelisting all IPs hardly seems like a professional way to go about doing things.

What is a better solution?

Answer 1

You should only allow those IPs from which your application will connect to MongoDB Atlas. Allow all IPs is a bad practice and could make that MongoDB instance vulnerable.