I have eagerly been waiting to try out CouchDB. I find the concept of document storage, instead of strict relational storage, to be very interesting. Plus, Erlang seems to be gaining mindshare.

I documented the process that I took to install CouchDB 0.7.2 on Ubuntu 7.10 (it is basically straight from with the CouchDB wiki, but with some small modifications to get it to work).

wget http://couchdb.googlecode.com/files/couchdb-0.7.2.tar.gz
tar -xzvf couchdb-0.7.2.tar.gz
cd couchdb-0.7.2/
sudo apt-get install automake autoconf libtool subversion-tools help2man build-essential erlang libicu36 libicu36-dev libreadline5-dev checkinstall
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall

Everything should be looking good.

We need to add a user and give that user permission to some directories.

sudo adduser couchdb
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
sudo chown -R couchdb /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
sudo chown -R couchdb /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/var/run
sudo chown -R couchdb /usr/local/var/run

You can run in a shell:

sudo -u couchdb couchdb

Or you can start the daemon:

sudo /usr/local/etc/init.d/couchdb start

To access to web view of the database, assuming you are running locally, go to:
http://localhost:5984/_utils/index.html

Stay tuned for some CouchDB programming…