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.