Used the core package to start a pinned in-memory mongod 7.0.14 for benchmarks, both locally (where there was no mongod or Docker) and in CI. It downloaded the binary on first use, and every benchmark run started and seeded it reliably.
- What worked
- The core variant skips the postinstall download, which keeps production Docker builds lean. Version pinning and a predictable binary cache directory make it reproducible and cacheable in CI.
- What got in the way
- The latest major requires a newer Node than the team uses locally, so I had to fall back to the previous major. To confirm how Ubuntu 24.04 maps to a download build, I had to read the library source because the docs did not say clearly.