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CouchDB on Arch was a bit of a pain to get working. I wanted to share my thoughts on how I got it to work and hopefully that’ll help solve a few people’s similar problems.

First, I couldn’t find a prebuilt package within arch (pacman) so we had to go totally by source of couchdb, to make this work. You can do it by the following steps:

1. Install Pacman Dependencies
pacman -S gcc make erlang extra/icu spidermonkey automake autoconf curl
2. Download the source code from the web site:

http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi?path=/couchdb/0.10.1/apache-couchdb-0.10.1.tar.gz

3. Unpack the source code: tar -xzvf apache-couchdb-0.10.1.tar.gz
4. cd into the directory and run ./configure –prefix=/
5. Run make and make install

What you’ll notice is that if you don’t run the above prefix, it goes into strange places, such as /usr/local/rc.d, which complicated matters when it came to finding the install locations for everything. If you already tried to install it, just cd back into the directory at step 4 and run “make uninstall” which will clean it all out first, then rerun configure, make and make install listed above.

You’ll notice that if you run /etc/rc.d/couchdb start, it won’t exactly work. This is because it wants a couchdb user, so lets create that:

useradd -s /bin/couchdb

But…it’s still not happy! Well, now we have permission issues. First we should fix the permissions:

chown -R couchdb:root /var/log/couchdb
chown -R couchdb:root /var/lib/couchdb

This should get you up and running smoothly at least with the basics, but there was one more thing I ran into, and that’s when running ps aux, the paths now have double front-slashes infront of everything. This is OK to my understanding, but you can edit /etc/rc.d/couchdb, and remove the double front-slashes as you see fit.

Now, you should be able to run /etc/rc.d/couchdb start successfully. You should notice some output like the following similar output, if you see only one process and a sleep then there’s a problem:

[root@tdtdev lib]# ps aux | grep -i ‘couchdb’
couchdb 1942 0.0 0.1 13544 1748 pts/3 S 16:38 0:00 /bin/sh -e /bin/couchdb -a \”//etc/couchdb/default.ini\” -a \”//etc/couchdb/local.ini\” -b -r 5 -p //var/run/couchdb/couchdb.pid -o /dev/null -e /dev/null -R
couchdb 1959 0.0 0.0 13544 1012 pts/3 S 16:38 0:00 /bin/sh -e /bin/couchdb -a \”//etc/couchdb/default.ini\” -a \”//etc/couchdb/local.ini\” -b -r 5 -p //var/run/couchdb/couchdb.pid -o /dev/null -e /dev/null -R
couchdb 1960 0.0 1.3 169508 13708 pts/3 Sl 16:38 0:00 /usr/lib/erlang/erts-5.7.3/bin/beam.smp -Bd -K true — -root /usr/lib/erlang -progname erl — -home /home/couchdb -noshell -noinput -smp auto -sasl errlog_type error -pa //lib/couchdb/erlang/lib/couch-0.10.1/ebin //lib/couchdb/erlang/lib/mochiweb-r97/ebin //lib/couchdb/erlang/lib/ibrowse-1.5.2/ebin //lib/couchdb/erlang/lib/erlang-oauth/ebin -eval application:load(ibrowse) -eval application:load(oauth) -eval application:load(crypto) -eval application:load(couch) -eval crypto:start() -eval ssl:start() -eval ibrowse:start() -eval couch_server:start([ "//etc/couchdb/default.ini", "//etc/couchdb/local.ini", "//etc/couchdb/default.ini", "//etc/couchdb/local.ini"]), receive done -> done end. -pidfile //var/run/couchdb/couchdb.pid -heart
couchdb 1969 0.0 0.0 3668 480 ? Ss 16:38 0:00 heart -pid 1960 -ht 11

So a total of 4 processes. You should also be able to visit your local URL too:

http://127.0.0.1:5984/

If you’re still having problems after this, some things I’ve done is edited /etc/rc.d/couchdb as mentioned above, as well as /etc/couchdb/default.ini to remove the double slashes from there.

I hope this helps, it took a bit to really get it here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 7:00 pm and is filed under programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.