Singletoned

I’ve been reading about CouchDB on and off for a few months now, and recently decided to properly evaluate it as an option for my new website. This decision weirdly coincided with the release of Google AppEngine which uses their Bigtable system, which is vaguely similar to CouchDB (non-relational, document based, flexible and scalable).

Anyway, I tried to install CouchDB on Leopard, and hit a few minor issues which I thought I’d document for others trying to install it.

I installed from Macports (always a good first stop). There appears to be a missing dependency on SeaMonkey, so you need to do:

sudo port install seamonkey
sudo port install couchdb

When you first start couchdb it complians that: CouchDB needs write permission on the data directory: /opt/local/var/lib/couchdb or CouchDB needs write permission on the log directory: /opt/local/var/log/couchdb.

I tried doing sudo couchdb to get over that, and couchdb seemed to start happily, and there was a response from http://localhost:5984/. However, when I inserted my first document using couchdb-python, python hung completely with no repsonse (I left it for 10 minutes while I made a coffee). In retrospect, sudo couchdb probably wasn’t the correct way to go (particularly as those directories don’t even exist), but I was keen to start playing. The correct thing to do is probably to create a couchdb user that runs the database and do sudo -u couchdb couchdb to start the database. Unfortunately I’m quite lazy, so instead I just did:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/var/lib/couchdb
sudo chown ed /opt/local/var/lib/couchdb
sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/var/log/couchdb
sudo chown ed /opt/local/var/log/couchdb

Where ed should be replaced by your username. mkdir -p recursively makes directories (incase you don’t have /opt/local/var/lib/ or /opt/local/var/log) yet.

Anyway, hope this helps someone else, if they have problems.