CouchDocs - Installing

Installing from sources

Get one of the source tarballs from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/ (1.7.0 or 1.8.0-rc1 will do).
Unpack the tarball. Note that once extracted the source are in the directory "js", without the expected version suffix.
Go to the js/src directory.

cd js/src
Build SpiderMonkey. There is no default Makefile, use Makefile.ref. The default build is debug, use BUILD_OPT=1 for an optimized build.

make BUILD_OPT=1 -f Makefile.ref
Install SpiderMonkey. Instead of "install" the target to use is "export". Instead of PREFIX the target directory is specified with JS_DIST.

sudo make BUILD_OPT=1 JS_DIST=/usr/local -f Makefile.ref export

Notes when installing on OS X

The export needs to be run as root so use $ sudo sh
When running ./configure for couchdb you will need to use the --with-js-include and --with-js-lib options
You will need to make sure /usr/local/spidermonkey/lib is in DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/spidermonkey/lib
If you're still getting dyld: Library not loaded: Darwin_OPT.OBJ/libjs.dylib when trying to start couchdb, run ranlib /usr/local/spidermonkey/libjs.a

Notes when installing on Linux

It would be best if you can install the SpiderMonkey libraries via your system's package management system, eg:

apt-get install libmozjs-dev

Or:

yum install js-devel

Warning: Yum may install an older version of SpiderMonkey (1.5) that doesn't work with CouchDB. If you see build errors related to JSOPTION_NATIVE_BRANCH_CALLBACK, you will need to build a newer version of SpiderMonkey as mentioned above.

However, if you need to install from source you should make sure spidermonkey's lib directory is in LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/spidermonkey/lib

Or if this does not work for you, set the /lib and /include locations when running ./configure by using something similar to:

./configure --with-js-lib=/usr/local/spidermonkey/lib --with-js-include=/usr/local/spidermonkey/include

If you get a message like this during "yum install js-devel":

No package js-devel available.
Nothing to do

you may need to add a yum repository. Add rpmforge.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d containing:

<!-- # Name: RPMforge RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise 5 - dag -->
<!-- # URL: <a href="http://rpmforge.net/">http://rpmforge.net/</a> -->

[rpmforge]
name = Red Hat Enterprise $releasever - <a href="RPMforge.net">RPMforge.net</a> - dag
baseurl = <a href="ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/atrpms.net/el5-i386/atrpms/stable">ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/atrpms.net/el5-i386/atrpms/stable</a>     enabled = 1
protect = 0
gpgcheck = 0

(Put "x86_64" instead of "i386" if when appropriate.)

Now run:

yum clean all
yum install js-devel

and you should be OK.