Random document from a collection in Mongoose

I found this Mongoose Schema static function in a GitHub Gist, which should achieve what you are after. It counts number of documents in the collection and then returns one document after skipping a random amount.

QuoteSchema.statics.random = function(callback) {
  this.count(function(err, count) {
    if (err) {
      return callback(err);
    }
    var rand = Math.floor(Math.random() * count);
    this.findOne().skip(rand).exec(callback);
  }.bind(this));
};

Source: https://gist.github.com/3453567

NB I modified the code a bit to make it more readable.

I've implemented a plugin for mongoose that does this in a very efficient way using a $near query on two randomly generated coordinates using a 2dsphere index. Check it out here: https://github.com/matomesc/mongoose-random.

If you are not wanting to add "test like" code into your schema, this uses Mongoose queries.

Model.count().exec(function(err, count){

  var random = Math.floor(Math.random() * count);

  Model.findOne().skip(random).exec(
    function (err, result) {

      // result is random 

  });

});

Look had the same problem, I did a little a plugin, here I leave https://gist.github.com/alejonext/6123943