Installing on OSX - Couchdb Wiki

To install CouchDB using MacPorts

$ sudo port install couchdb

should be enough. MacPorts takes care of installing all necessary dependencies. If you have already installed some of the CouchDB dependencies via MacPorts, run this command to check and upgrade any outdated ones, after installing CouchDB:

$ sudo port upgrade couchdb

This will upgrade dependencies recursively, if there are more recent versions available. If you want to run CouchDB as a service controlled by the OS, load the launchd configuration which comes with the project, with this command:

$ sudo launchctl load -w /opt/local/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.couchdb.plist

and it should be up and accessible via http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils/index.html. It should also be restarted automatically after reboot (because of the -w flag).

Updating the ports collection. The collection of port files has to be updated to reflect the latest versions of available packages. In order to do that run:

$ sudo port selfupdate

to update the port tree, and then install just as explained.

Dependencies - Erlang

If Erlang fails to build with the error:

Command output: megaco_flex_scanner_drv.flex:31: unknown error processing section 1

You will need to upgrade flex: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=465039

Typical build process of a CouchDB developer build

$ svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/trunk couchdb
$ cd couchdb
$ ./bootstrap && ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Unofficial Binary Packages

If you just want to give CouchDB a shot and don't like the command line based installation, you can get this unofficial binary release for MacOS X 10.5 Leopard and Intel Macs only: http://janl.github.com/couchdbx/