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Does anyone know of a step by step installation guide for CouchDB in the free tier 32bit AWS EC2 instance?

Keep in mind that YUM is limited by default and I would need to add yum.repos to get extra stuff. I've tried all different articles and RPMs but none seem to work.

I also tried couchbase but it has extremely poor post-install instructions. The server start but then what? I couldn't find the files, configs, or install directories. And, how do I access it?

CouchDB sounds like such a great database but it really needs to break these barriers of entry. MongoDb has better docs, although I couldn't get that to work either (I spent a fraction of the time trying, though).

Thanks :)

Andres
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7 Answers7

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Enable the EPEL repository first and then install it with yum install couchdb

You can enable EPEL using the instructions here.

EDIT:

More information at http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Installing_on_RHEL5. Keep in mind that the Linux EC2 AMI is a cut down version of CentOS and you can add custom repositories and install as you wish.

Michael Waskosky
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Jay Sidri
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  • Is there a better Free Tier instance to use for a Apache/PHP/CouchDB setup? – Andres May 30 '11 at 04:01
  • The free tier instance uses micro instance with 613 MB of RAM. While I don't have any experience deploying couchDB in production environments, I would think this is pretty limited. You probably want more memory and processing power depending on how large your datasets are. Then again, there is nothing stopping you from starting with a micro-instance and then scaling out to a larger instance when the time comes. – Jay Sidri May 30 '11 at 04:46
  • This should be the answer. The previous one is a bit more prone to error. – Gopherkhan Jul 25 '12 at 21:34
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The apache team put together this quick script that installs CouchDB (thanks @_jhs for build-couchdb!) on an Amazon Linux AMI:

https://gist.github.com/1171217

If you are using cloudinit + the EC2 command line tools, simply use ec2-run-instances with --user-data-file (you will need some mods to the script to save the password or locally generate one) and voila'. Relaxing FTW.

Worked like a charm for me!

SantiArias
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Here is a quick run down of the steps I use to install couchdb 1.5.1 on Amazon Linux 2014.03.1. See also this post on my blog http://www.everyhaironyourhead.com/installing-couchdb-1-5-1-on-amazon-linux-ami-2014-03-1/.

Core deps and dev tools.

  1. Enable the EPEL Repo by editing the file /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo and setting it to enabled.

  2. Next install the deps and tools.

    sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++ libtool libicu-devel openssl-devel autoconf-archive erlang python27 python-sphinx help2man

Get the SpiderMonkey JS Engine and build it...

wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/js185-1.0.0.tar.gz
tar xvfz js185-1.0.0.tar.gz
cd js-1.8.5/js/src
./configure
make
sudo make install

You should see it installed under /usr/local/lib

Build CouchDB.

  1. Download the source package for CouchDB, unpack it and cd in.

  2. Point it to the required libs and configure.

    ./configure --with-erlang=/usr/lib64/erlang/usr/include --with-js-lib=/usr/local/lib/ --with-js-include=/usr/local/include/js/

make

sudo make install

Prepare the CouchDB installation.

  1. Make a couchdb user.

    sudo useradd -r -d /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb -M -s /bin/bash couchdb

  2. Set the file ownerships.

    sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/etc/couchdb
sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/run/couchdb
sudo chmod 0775 /usr/local/etc/couchdb
sudo chmod 0775 /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
sudo chmod 0775 /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
sudo chmod 0775 /usr/local/var/run/couchdb

Prepare the init scripts.

  1. Link the init script and copy the log rotate script to /etc.

    sudo cp /usr/local/etc/logrotate.d/couchdb /etc/logrotate.d
sudo ln -s /usr/local/etc/rc.d/couchdb /etc/init.d/couchdb

  2. This and most other linux distros don’t include /usr/local/lib in ld, so CouchDB will have problems finding the SpiderMonkey libs we installed there earlier. One way to solve this is to add the following line to the top of the /etc/init.d/couchdb startup script.

    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

    See man page for ldconfig for more info, and please comment with a better solution.

  3. You may want to edit /usr/local/etc/default/couchdb to turn off the auto respawn.

  4. To get it to autostart, just use the standard linux setup tools for running service scripts.

    sudo chkconfig --add couchdb

    It should pick up the default run levels needed from the script, but in case it doesn’t, you can do it manually like this...

    sudo chkconfig --level 3 couchdb on
sudo chkconfig --level 4 couchdb on
sudo chkconfig --level 5 couchdb on

    You can sudo chkconfig —list to confirm its there. See man chkconfig for more details.

Relax.

Finally reboot (or just start couchdb from the script) and confirm its running with curl http://127.0.0.1:5984/

Comments, corrections, improvements, and criticisms are appreciated.

Raffi M.
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  • This does not work for couchdb 1.6.1. Cannot install 'autoconf-archive'. Repositories epel and epel-source are enabled. yum list epel-release\* epel-release.noarch 6-8.9.amzn1 installed – dbow Oct 25 '15 at 20:00
  • I intend to update the blog with another post with instructions for 1.6.1 on the latest Amazon Linux. It became less urgent when I found excellent instructions already exist for it here ... https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/COUCHDB/Amazon+Linux – Raffi M. Oct 27 '15 at 03:21
  • I have found the solution here https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=185101 – dbow Oct 27 '15 at 18:32
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    Installing CouchDB 1.6.1 on Amazon Linux AMI 2015.09.1 updated article here ... http://www.everyhaironyourhead.com/installing-couchdb-1-6-1-on-amazon-linux-ami-2015-09/. – Raffi M. Nov 21 '15 at 22:40
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I googled: "build couchdb" and followed the steps I am installing it. I can tell you it is very painful. After pressing "rake", you need to wait 2, maybe 3 hours until all the dependencies are compiled. I am still installing it right now in my free tier server. You have to make sure you have that time to keep your terminal busy out there!

However, it is the only working solution so far for me. It is installing automatically for real.

VansonLeung
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Add the EPEL repository first and then install it with yum install couchdb

Yeah, not exactly. I'm running AWS Free Tier standard and installing couch has been hell on earth - lots and lots of dependency issues around erland various graphics libs, I'll report back here when I get a process that works

okay, the issue for me was wxGTK.x86_64 - It had a list of 15 or so dependencies that wouldn't install through yum (even with epel) and I had to manually install the rpms and dependencies before yum install couchdb would work.

Not sure the default AMI is a good idea if you want couch!

MikeB
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I also tried couchbase but it has extremely poor post-install instructions. The server start but then what? I couldn't find the files, configs, or install directories. And, how do I access it?

Sorry for hearing about the experience you are having! We have been focused on making Couchbase highly performant and scalable recently so understand the developer experience pain such as documentations. Hopefully these two step by step guides would help!

This is on how to install the Couchbase Server and Couchbase Sync Gateway Amazon AMI on AWS and then how to connect Couchbase Sync Gateway to a mobile application:

Part 1 : Database on Amazon: Installing Couchbase AMI on AWS The first part goes over how to install and access the Couchbase Web Console.

Part 2 : Database on Amazon: Connecting Couchbase Sync Gateway to Couchbase AMI on AWS The second part goes over how to access the Couchbase contents/directory

You mentioned CouchDB and Couchbase together in this thread and they have different APIs but the Couchbase Sync Gateway component would be able to sit in front of CouchDB through the REST APIs as another option.

sweetiewill
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For those specifically installing on AWS Linux 2 Installing Couchdb on AWS Linux 2

This page uses Apache Couchdb binary installation Instructions

Using the Centos installation instructions. Create the bintray-apache-couchdb-rpm.repo file in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory Fill in the full path to the repository list rather than using the Relver and Architecture macros.

[bintray--apache-couchdb-rpm] name=bintray--apache-couchdb-rpm baseurl=http://apache.bintray.com/couchdb-rpm/el7/x86_64/
gpgcheck=0
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

Yum install after enabling epel

sudo yum update && sudo yum install -y couchdb

Continue with the Couchdb and configuration as normal

Simon Lucy
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