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:

  3. Edit config file to suit:

  4. Start CouchDB:

  5. Set it to start automatically on reboots:

Building CouchDB from source

  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

  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 <a href="http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/trunk">http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/trunk</a> couchdb
$ cd couchdb
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./configure --with-erlang=/usr/lib64/erlang/usr/include
$ make
<!-- # make install -->

  1. Edit config file to suit

  2. 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.

  1. Launch!

Or as daemon:

<!-- # /usr/local/etc/rc.d/couchdb start -->

  1. Run as daemon on start-up: