Installing CouchDB Edge

CouchDB’s been seeing some interest growth lately, and we’ve been “on the cusp” of an 0.9 release for a while. 0.9 is still “soon”, but for those who don’t want to wait for a release, you’ll need to run against CouchDB trunk if you want to play with the latest codes.

Also, with CouchDB adapting rapidly (in some areas of the API—the data storage core is stable at this point) you’ll want to keep up to date so that libraries, examples, etc, all continue to work

Git the source

If you want to install CouchDB using Git, the best source currently is Halorgium’s CouchDB fork on Github.

Just run:

git clone git://github.com/halorgium/couchdb.git && cd couchdb

Subversion

The official source of CouchDB is maintained in Apache’s Subversion repository.

To check it out:

svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/trunk/ couchdb
cd couchdb

Building from source

From a fresh checkout, run this to build:

./bootstrap && ./configure && make

I like to use the developer make target to avoid running make install after every time I update my checkout. To build and run in developer mode use:

make dev && utils/run

You can set your configuration parameters in the etc/couchdb/local_dev.ini file. Dev mode stores data, logs, and view indexes in the ./tmp directory. If you are deploying a CouchDB application, please do go ahead and run make install as well as checking the README about how to register Couch as a service with your operating system.

If you have troubles, detailed information is in the CouchDB README .

Dependencies

CouchDB uses ICU for Unicode collation, Spidermonkey for JavaScript support, Curl to give Spidermonkey the ability to make HTTP requests, and the autotools suite for the build, among others.

Satisfying the dependencies is covered in the README, however you should note that old versions of Erlang do not perform well for CouchDB. You should run on Erlang >= R12B-4. The difference is substantial.