How to Install Apache CouchDB on CentOS/RHEL 7/6

Written by Rahul, Updated on November 10, 2017

CouchDB is an open source project and NoSQL, document oriented database server. It stored data with JSON documents. It also provides web interface to access documents online. Click here to read more details about CoutchDB

This tutorial will help you to install Apache CouchDB server on CentOS, RedHat 7/6 servers.

Step 1 – Enabel Yum Repositories

First of all, use below command to install EPEL yum repository on your system. In case epel repository package not found, use this tutorial to install epel package.

yum install epel-release-7-11.noarch.rpm

Now create yum repository for Apache Couchdb. Create a file /etc/yum.repos.d/apache-couchdb.repo file using the below content.

[bintray--apache-couchdb-rpm]
name=Apache-couchdb
baseurl=http://apache.bintray.com/couchdb-rpm/el$releasever/$basearch/
gpgcheck=0
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

Step 2 – Install Apache CouchDB Package

Install CouchDB package using yum command line tool. It will also install many more dependencies on your system.

yum install couchdb

Step 3 – Configure CouchDB

By default, CouchDB runs on port 5984 and will be accessible to localhost only. To make it available on network system edit CouchDB config file /opt/couchdb/etc/local.ini and update following values.

vim /opt/couchdb/etc/local.ini

Navigate to [chttpd] section and update port and bind_address as per system. Set 0.0.0.0 to bind address to make is accessible with every enterface.

[chttpd]
port = 5984
bind_address = 192.168.10.30

Navigate to the end of this file and set the admin user and password. As per below settings we use admin as the username with password secret.

[admins]
admin = secret

Restart CouchDB service after changing the password every time. CouchDB will encode this password.

Step 4 – Start CouchDB Service

Start CouchDB service using following commands and also configure to autostart on system boot.

### on CentOS/RHEL 7 ### 
systemctl enable couchdb.service
systemctl start couchdb.service

### on CentOS/RHEL 6 ### 
service couchdb start
chkconfig couchdb on

CouchDB will start on port 5984 and will be accessible through a browser.

Step 5 – Create Database in CouchDB

Now, create your first database on CouchDB server. For example, your CouchDB server ip is 192.168.10.20. First set the HOST variable with following details. This will make other commands to run easily. After that use curl to create a database.

HOST="http://admin:[email protected]:5984"
curl -X PUT $HOST/mydb

{"ok":true}