How to replicate design documents only?

Question

So I want to replicate some changes I made to my design files from dev to production (a.k.a. I want to deploy something).

I'm somehow confused since my research did not lead to any concrete results. Although this seams IMHO like a pretty obvious use case.

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

You can specify the document IDs to replicate, without having to write a filter. Post the replication document (or command) like so:

{ "source": "my_db"
, "target": "http://target:5984/target_db"
, "doc_ids": [ "_design/my_ddoc" ]
}

Answer 2

You can use 'Filtered Replication' (See http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Replication#Filtered_Replication for details)

Basically, you'll supply a function that returns true for design documents like;

function(doc, req) {
  return "_design/" === doc._id.substr(0, 8)
}

and then add "filter":"ddocname/filtername" to your _replicate request body.

Answer 3

I keep my design documents stored as .js files on disk. Then I use couchdb-update-views to update the design documents on a server

npm install -g couchdb-update-views
couchdb-update-views --config /path/to/config.json --docsDir /path/to/design/docs/directory/