Installing CouchDB in AWS EC2 Free Tier

Question

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 :)

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

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/.

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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
   

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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

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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
   

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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
   

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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.

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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.