Installing CouchDB on Ubuntu: Problems and fixes

Got around to install CouchDB from source on a Ubuntu VM. CouchDB is schemaless “document” database server with a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. I’m mostly experimenting it with because of the schemaless design. The map/reduce views took a bit to get used to after being so well acustomed to SQL queries in the past, but I like what I see so far.

While installing it, I ran into a few problems:

Install Erlang(I was having trouble with the 64-bit erlang and openssl package, i ended up just using the 32 bit version):

sudo apt-get install build-essential erlang

First error message:

configure: error: Could not find the js library.
Is the Mozilla SpiderMonkey library installed?

Uh oh, let’s install spidermonkey:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:launchpad/ppa
sudo apt-get install libmozjs-dev

Another error pops up:

checking for icu-config... no
*** The icu-config script could not be found. Make sure it is
*** in your path, and that taglib is properly installed.
*** Or see http://ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/
configure: error: Library requirements (ICU) not met.

Oh no, international character support needed, install icu:

sudo apt-get install libicu-dev

And then another error appears:

checking for curl-config... no
*** The curl-config script could not be found. Make sure it is
*** in your path, and that curl is properly installed.
*** Or see http://curl.haxx.se/
configure: error: Library requirements (curl) not met.

Hmm, curl needed:

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

Now for Couchdb install commands (stolen from the couchdb wiki)

svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/trunk couchdb
cd couchdb
./bootstrap
./configure
make
sudo make install
make clean
make distclean
sudo -i
adduser --system --home /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb --no-create-home --shell /bin/bash --group --gecos "CouchDB Administrator" couchdb
chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/run
chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/etc/couchdb
chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/var/run
chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/etc/couchdb
cp /usr/local/etc/init.d/couchdb /etc/init.d/
update-rc.d couchdb defaults

Start it up with:

sudo /etc/init.d/couchdb start

CouchDB has a really great development community behind it. Subscribe to the mailing list, read the wiki, follow the couchdb twitter and read the book