I’ve had some hard time when wasn’t showing up. Without digging deep into Mongoose, I quickly turned mode off, crafting a new technical debt. After a while, I decided to spend some to look into this particular issue. virtuals lean (optional) A Quick Primer This section is also available in my another article . What is Lean mode in Mongoose? When lean mode is enabled, all queries return plain JavaScript objects instead of Mongoose Document. In this case, Mongoose will never have to instantiate Mongoose Document from plain JS object, apply magic methods, etc. Neglecting all these overhead in Lean mode, it makes perfect sense to have lean enabled by default. What is Virtual? Virtuals are attributes derived during query, which the values are not actually persisted in MongoDB. Since virtual is one of Mongoose magic attributes, it is disabled by default. Using The Mongoose Plugin— mongoose-lean-virtual Thanks to the community, I discovered the official plugin — , which supports virtuals which preserving the behavior of lean mode. mongoose-lean-virtuals In this article, I will be focusing on how to apply in a typical Feathers.js Mongoose service (generated with feathers-cli). mongoose-lean-virtuals Install mongoose-lean-virtual First of all, install it: npm install --save mongoose-lean-virtuals Defining Model Suppose we are creating a service, we define our model as: user In our model, we defined a virtual to return the Object ID of our user document. Then, we set the properties and to show virtuals. To apply , we also add in line 20. uid toObject toJSON mongoose-lean-virtuals Defining Service In , we add as the value of lean in our service options (line 11). user.service.js {virtuals: true} Voila! Try to consume your service, you should be able to see the virtuals now. Virtual is now available. Performance Concern According to Mongoose documentation, lean mode is enabled to enhance query performance. However, would applying affect the performance of our app? mongoose-lean-virtuals I have done a simple profiling and have the results posted . Feel free to check it out to understand the performance impact of . here mongoose-lean-virtuals If you find this article helpful, feel free to give me some 👏 👏 👏 generously.