CouchDB from Src How-To

Well this was more effort than it should have been. I have been dabbling with Erlang for a while, and after struggling with MySQL, Tomcat and JDBC I was looking for an alternative web-app stack. CouchDB looks to be perfect, although sufficiently new that there is not a lot of documentation, both of the books available right now are OK, but not brilliant. In general I prefer the style of CouchDB: The Definitive Guide but prefer the examples from Beginning CouchDB. My personal preference with programming and software tool books is that they should provide detailed, hand-held, speak-to-me-like-I-am-an-imbecile walk-throughs of the most common basic use cases.

Anyhow, CouchApp looks like a great way to develop apps for CouchDB, although documentation is fairly sparse. The main problem I found is that the versions of Erlang and CouchDB available from repositories for both Ubuntu and Debian are way behind the cutting edge to the point that the examples in the books won’t run. I found that the best way to set up my CouchApp development environment is to completely avoid the repositories and build from source in a clean Ubuntu server VM using the following steps:

• $ apt-get update
• $ apt-get clean
• $ apt-get upgrade

We are going to be building some software so the following tools are useful:

• $ sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion git-core openssh-server

Install Erlang

• $ sudo apt-get build-dep erlang
• $ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
• $ wget http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R14A.tar.gz
• $ tar zxvf otp_src_R14A.tar.gz
• $ cd otp_src_R14A
• $ ./configure
• $ make && sudo make install

Install CouchDB

• $ sudo apt-get build-dep couchdb
• $ sudo apt-get install xulrunner-dev libicu-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libtool
• $ wget http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/ftp.apache.org/couchdb/1.0.0/apache-couchdb-1.0.0.tar.gz
• $ tar zxvf apache-couchdb-1.0.0.tar.gz
• $ cd apache-couchdb-1.0.0
• $ ./configure
• $ ./configure –with-js-lib=/usr/lib/xulrunner-devel-1.9.2.3/lib –with-js-include=/usr/lib/xulrunner-devel-1.9.2.3/include
• $ make CouchDB
• $make
• $sudo make install

Final Setup & Running CouchDB

• $ adduser –system –home /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb –no-create-home –shell /bin/bash –group –gecos “CouchDB Administrator” couchdb
• $ sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/etc/couchdb
• $ sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
• $sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
• $sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/run/couchdb
• $sudo chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/etc/couchdb
• $sudo chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
• $sudo chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
• $sudo chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/var/run/couchdb
• $ sudo ln -s /usr/local/etc/init.d/couchdb /etc/init.d/couchdb

Put xulrunner-devel on your LD_LIBRARY_PATH

• $ sudo touch /etc/ld.so.conf.d/couchdb.conf
• $ sudo cat > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/couchdb.conf
• /usr/lib/xulrunner-devel-1.9.2.6 (NB. Check the version that you have installed!)
• <CTRL-D>
• $ sudo ldconfig

Running CouchDB Manually

• $ sudo -i -u couchdb couchdb

Running CouchDB As a Daemon

• $ sudo /etc/init.d/couchdb start