Chapter 2. Installation

For you to get started with CouchDB, you need to install the CouchDB application. You may be lucky enough to have CouchDB installed already. For example, if you use Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) or later, then CouchDB comes pre-installed.

If not, you’ll need to use one of the methods below to get CouchDB installed on your system:

  • Install using the native packages for your chosen Linux platform. Many of the Linux distributions include CouchDB within their standard package suites.

  • By downloading the source code from the Apache CouchDB project page. Building from source requires a suitable build environment, some libraries, and prerequisites (such as Erlang). In general this method is not recommended as the prebuilt packages are much easier to use.

The first method is the easiest solution and will get you up and running as quickly as possible. The latter option may be useful to you if you want to do any development or customization of CouchDB.

Installation on Linux

Certain Linux platforms either include CouchDB or provide a package as part of its native package management system.

On Ubuntu and Debian you can use:

sudo aptitude install couchdb

On Gentoo Linux there is a CouchDB ebuild available:

sudo emerge couchdb

In all cases, the installation should install and automatically start CouchDB for you. If not, you can always start or stop using the init scripts. For example:

/etc/init.d/couchdb start

Installation on Mac OS X

On Max OS X there are builds available using Homebrew (see ...

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