I didn't find a way to install CouchDB 1.6.1 on Debian Jessie. I found many solutions on the web describing how one can compile CouchDB. I'd like to avoid compilation on production machines.
Did someone else find a way to do it in a native manner (using .deb package)? \
After searching for a while on the net I finally found my solution. I'm still not sure if I'd use this on production machines. The trick was to use the precompiled binaries from the Ubuntu repository on launchpad. The binaries there have only one additional dependency on upstart service. Here are my steps.
# apt update
# apt install software-properties-common
# add-apt-repository ppa:couchdb/stable -y
# vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/couchdb-stable-jessie.list
- replace jessie with trusty
- save and exit
# apt install upstart couchdb
The installation didn't complete properly and the CouchDB wasn't executed. After a restart of the machine everything was OK due to the dependency to the upstart service and the CouchDB processes were running in the background. It was also accessible over the web UI. Running apt command again will repair the previous failed installation.
It's not very straight forward, thanks to the old versions of Erlang used by CouchDB 1.6.1. I documented the procedure for doing this here.