CouchDB Setup Guide

CouchDB is a high availability, partition tolerant and eventually consistent NoSQL database. CouchDB embraces the web by manipulating JSON data objects and offering data access through HTTP REST APIs.

Erlang

Much of CouchDB is written in the Erlang programming language. Therefor Erlang must be available on the system deploying CouchDB. The easiest way for linux users to install Erlang is to use the package manager shipped with your distribution. In the case shown below this is aptitude (Ubuntu and Debian).

sudo apt-get install erlang erlang-dev erlang-manpages erlang-base-hipe erlang-eunit erlang-nox erlang-xmerl erlang-inets

The web site has a binary file download for Window's users at the URL shown below.

http://www.erlang.org/download.html

CouchDB

To get the latest version of CouchDB it is recommended you install it from source. For Mac OS X and Windows users the link below has installers.

http://couchdb.apache.org/

For Linux users there are a number of third party dependencies that need to be resolved. Use your favourite package manager to install the libraries.

sudo apt-get install -y libmozjs185-dev libicu-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libtool

The link also has a source tarball for Linux users, which requires manual building and installation. Download the source file and run the following commands to install CouchDB on your system.

tar -zxvf apache-couchdb-1.4.0.tar.gz
cd apache-couchdb-1.4.0/
./configure
make
sudo make install

CouchDB should now be installed on your system.