CouchDB vs DesktopCouch

Question

I've seen a couple of apps using something called the DesktopCouch. What are the differences between CouchDB and DesktopCouch?

Answer 1

You can refer to this post by Stuart Langridge:

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2009/09/03/desktop-couch-irc-talk

Basically desktop couch is a program on Ubuntu that gives every user their own CouchDB and handles some periodic tasks in CouchDB.

For example, if multiple users get their own CouchDB server then it can't be run on the default port, so it is started on a random port and Desktop Couch has facilities that help you find your couchdb on which ever port it was started under.

But desktopcouch refers to all the work Ubuntu has put in to making CouchDB easy for developers to use in applications for Ubuntu as well, there is a Python library, there are facilities for managing replication to other CouchDB instances and resolving conflicts (mainly UbuntuOne).

The important thing to notice thought is that this is not an alternative implementation of CouchDB. desktopcouch uses the regular Apache CouchDB server.

Answer 2

The default installation bundled with desktopcouch is couchdb 0.1

If you plan on developing you should loose this and use the latest from couchbase.

To completely remove the default couch instance you'll need to apt-get remove couchdb-bin