Installing on RHEL 5

These instructions also work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible distributions like CentOS.

Note: COUCHDB-315 has an attached patch for the CouchDB README which adds instructions for RHEL 5.

Installing a prepackaged CouchDB

1. Enable the EPEL repository.

2. Install the couchdb package from EPEL:

# yum install couchdb

3. Edit config file to suit:

# vi /etc/couchdb/local.ini

4. Start CouchDB:

# service couchdb start

5. Set it to start automatically on reboots:

# chkconfig --level 345 couchdb on

Building CouchDB from source (with EPEL packages)

1. Install prerequisites. You will need to enable the EPEL repository for the js-devel and erlang packages (or build js and erlang from source).

# yum install libicu-devel openssl-devel curl-devel make gcc erlang js-devel libtool which

1.1 If installing CouchDB >= 0.11, you will need cURL>= 7.18. Currently neither EPEL, nor IUS provide a current enough libcurl. Visit the curl download page for the most recent curl package.

$ wget http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.20.1.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf curl-7.20.1.tar.gz
$ cd curl-7.20.1
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$ make
$ make test
# make install

2. Install CouchDB

The configure line below is for 64-bit, adjust for your arch (or leave out --with-erlang if configure can find out for itself). You can use a release tarball instead of a checkout, in that case skip right to the ./confgure line.

$ svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/trunk couchdb
$ cd couchdb
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./configure --with-erlang=/usr/lib64/erlang/usr/include
$ make
# make install

3. Edit config file to suit

# vi /usr/local/etc/couchdb/local.ini

4. Create user, modify ownership and permissions

Create the couchdb user:

# adduser -r --home /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb -M --shell /bin/bash --comment "CouchDB Administrator" couchdb

See the README for additional chown and chmod commands to run.

4.1 fix permission

chown -R couchdb: /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb /usr/local/var/log/couchdb

5. Launch!

# sudo -u couchdb couchdb

Or as daemon:

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/couchdb start

6. Run as daemon on start-up:

# ln -s /usr/local/etc/rc.d/couchdb /etc/init.d/couchdb
# chkconfig --add couchdb
# chkconfig --level 345 couchdb on

Building CouchDB from source (with standard packages only)

Tested with 64-bit CentOS 5.6. Replace "/opt/couchdb" with a directory of your choice.

1. Install prerequisites (standard packages only, no additional repositories).

# yum install gcc libtool xulrunner-devel libicu-devel openssl-devel

2. Build Erlang from otp_src_R14B.tar.gz:

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/couchdb/erlang --without-termcap --without-javac --enable-smp-support --disable-hipe
$ make
# make install

3. Build Curl from curl-7.21.6.tar.gz:

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/couchdb/curl
$ make
# make install

4. Build CouchDB from apache-couchdb-1.0.2.tar.gz

$ ERL=/opt/couchdb/erlang/bin/erl ERLC=/opt/couchdb/erlang/bin/erlc CURL_CONFIG=/opt/couchdb/curl/bin/curl-config LDFLAGS=-L/opt/couchdb/curl/lib ./configure --prefix=/opt/couchdb/couchdb --with-erlang=/opt/couchdb/erlang/lib/erlang/usr/include/ --with-js-include=/usr/include/xulrunner-sdk-1.9.2/ --with-js-lib=/usr/lib64/xulrunner-sdk-1.9.2/lib
$ make
# make install