OK, so I’ve spent most of the morning installing couchdb on my Ubuntu oneiric ocelot server. Thought I would note down the steps so that I could remember how to do it next time!
The resources I’ve used include:
guide.couchdb.org/draft/source.html
till.klampaeckel.de/blog/archives/55-CouchDB-on-Ubuntu-on-AWS.html
1. Download from couchdb.apache.org/downloads.html. I used apache-couchdb-1.1.1.tar.gz. With my Ubuntu the download is saved to Downloads directory in my home directory [~/Downloads].
2. I then unpacked into the same Downloads directory:
tar -zxvf ~/Downloads/apache-couchdb-1.1.1.tar.gz
3. CD into the newly extracted folder, in my case, apache-couchdb-1.1.1
4. Couchdb installs 5 new directories: bin; etc; lib; share; var. I wanted an obvious named directory to hold all of these. So,
./configure --prefix=/opt/couchdb make
5. I used checkinstall to help management of the application. There was an error creating sub-directories which was fixed by using the –fstrans option.
sudo checkinstall -y --fstrans=0 --pkgname=apache-couchdb --pkgversion=1.1.1 --maintainer=[name]@[address] --pakdir=/opt --pkglicense=Apache
6. I created a user named ‘couchdb’. But I ran into a problem when switching to the new user in the terminal, I didn’t know what the password was, and it wouldn’t accept an empty string. So I created a password for the couchdb user.
sudo adduser --system --home /opt/couchdb/var/lib/couchdb --no-create-home --shell /bin/bash --group --gecos "CouchDB" couchdb sudo passwd couchdb
7. I created 2 symlinks:
sudo ln -s /opt/couchdb/etc/init.d/couchdb /etc/init.d/couchdb sudo ln -s /opt/couchdb/etc/logrotate.d/couchdb /etc/logrotate.d/couchdb
8. I changed ownership of the new directories:
chown -R couchdb:couchdb /opt/couchdb/etc/couchdb chown -R couchdb:couchdb /opt/couchdb/var/lib/couchdb chown -R couchdb:couchdb /opt/couchdb/var/log/couchdb chown -R couchdb:couchdb /opt/couchdb/var/run/couchdb
8. I changed permission on the directories:
chmod -R 0770 /opt/couchdb/etc/couchdb chmod -R 0770 /opt/couchdb/var/lib/couchdb chmod -R 0770 /opt/couchdb/var/log/couchdb chmod -R 0770 /opt/couchdb/var/run/couchdb
9. Switching to the couchdb user on the terminal I started the newly minted couchdb database:
su couchdb service couchdb start
10. Running the test scripts in the futon administration app, I had four failures:
attachments
auth_cache
list_views
rev_stemming
The cause of this might have been using the localhost:5984/_utils URL. These pass when using 127.0.0.1:5984/_utils
11. However, in the meantime I decided to download a standalone version of couchdb and see if that would boot without errors in the tests!
So, over to https://github.com/iriscouch/build-couchdb
12. I followed the clear instructions. I had to install git, this was the only additional step.
sudo apt-get install git
13. The rake step took ages, about 30 minutes, and now my standalone couchdb is a mammoth 500Mb directory. The advantage is that this can be deleted to remove the install. Starting the db isn’t so sweet:
build/bin/couchdb
Since control isn’t passed back to the terminal. And I couldn’t figure how to stop it without closing the terminal!
14. The same errors occurred on the tests in futon with this install; smelling a red-herring this is what caused me to investigate and conclude that these were not important.
