Installing CouchDB Version 0.10.1 On Fedora 4

I've heard about the hype on CouchDB from this link NoSQL and the design behind it is pretty interesting. It's a different kind of database that doesn't use schemas at all. Built on Erlang which is a well known language solid enough to handle a grand scale of processes without sacrificing performance. Its data structure is a B-tree and uses MapReduce to traverse it at an incredible speed. CouchDB is document based and provides the option of
working online and offline. With its interesting characteristics, I decided to install it on my Fedora machine.

Here are the dependencies I've installed (assuming everything was a downloaded source):
    1. curl-7.19
    2. SpiderMonkey - js-1.7.0
    3. ICU - icu4c-4_2_1
    4. Erlang OTP - otp_src_R13B03
    5. autoconf-2.13

Somebody had provided a script to properly and easily wire SpiderMonkey with CouchDB as can be seen from http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:http://dt.in.th/2008-03-03.spidermonkey-linux.html. This is our script:

#!/bin/bash
if test "$USER" = root; then
    wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/js-1.7.0.tar.gz -O- | tar xvz
    cd js/src
    make -f Makefile.ref
    mkdir -p /usr/include/smjs/ -v
    cp *.{h,tbl} /usr/include/smjs/ -v
    cd Linux_All_DBG.OBJ
    cp *.h /usr/include/smjs/ -v
    mkdir -p /usr/local/{bin,lib}/ -v
    cp js /usr/local/bin/ -v
    cp libjs.so /usr/local/lib/ -v
else
    echo "You must be root. Try sudo $0"
fi

To ensure that CouchDB will compile properly, use the options --with-js-lib and --with-js-include when installing it. Type the command couchdb to run it. Then try to run this command curl http://127.0.0.1:5984/. You should see something like this {"couchdb":"Welcome","version":"0.10.1"} as the response. This means that the database was successfully installed.

Futon is a great web interface to the database. Be sure to run all tests from Futon. If the URL used to access Futon is say http://localhost:5984/_utils, there are 3 tests that will fail - oauth, replication and security_validation. This is a known issue for some common network configurations. My setup is basically a Windows XP accessing thru Futton the CouchDB server instance  which is installed on a Fedora machine. Both machines are connected via a router without any DNS configurations. Whatever the network configuration is, this URL will always work and all tests passes - http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils.

I prefer a different ip address used to access Futon so I went ahead and updated two configuration files which are default.ini and local.ini. The settings from local.ini will override the default.ini. Depending on your installation of CouchDB, these files can be found at /usr/local/etc/couchdb directory. Change the binding address to suit your needs.