If you want to hit mongodb directly via the node.js native api you can use db.collectionNames():
List existing collections
List names
Collections can be listed with collectionNames
db.collectionNames(callback);
callback gets two parameters - an error object (if error occured) and an array of collection names as strings.
Collection names also include database name, so a collection named posts in a database blog will be listed as blog.posts.
Additionally there’s system collections which should not be altered without knowing exactly what you are doing, these sollections can be identified with system prefix. For example posts.system.indexes.
Example:
var MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient , format = require('util').format;
MongoClient.connect('mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/test', function(err, db) {
if(err) throw err;
db.collectionNames(function(err, collections){
console.log(collections);
});
});
http://mongodb.github.io/node-mongodb-native/markdown-docs/collections.html