Unable to start CouchDB

Question

Just installed CouchDb using brew on mac mountain lion. Everything went well till I hit the following issue to start the server I do not know erlnag and could not analyze the dump file

`couchdb
Apache CouchDB 1.2.1 (LogLevel=info) is starting.
{"init terminating in do_boot",{{badmatch,{error,{bad_return,{{couch_app,start,[normal,["/usr/local/etc/couchdb/default.ini","/usr/local/etc/couchdb/local.ini"]]},{'EXIT',{{badmatch,{error,shutdown}},[{couch_server_sup,start_server,1,[{file,"couch_server_sup.erl"},{line,98}]},{application_master,start_it_old,4,[{file,"application_master.erl"},{line,274}]}]}}}}}},[{couch,start,0,[{file,"couch.erl"},{line,18}]},{init,start_it,1,[]},{init,start_em,1,[]}]}}

Crash dump was written to: erl_crash.dump
init terminating in do_boot ()`

Any help much appreciated. I have left the configurations files as it is

Answer 1

Often this is due to incorrect permissions on various configuration files & directories. It can be caused by running as a sudo / root user for example.

You can try fixing this using the following, but you may need to either create/add yourself to a couchdb group, or use a different user:group combination.

sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /etc/couchdb /var/lib/couchdb /var/run/couchdb /var/log/couchdb
sudo chmod -R 770 /etc/couchdb /var/lib/couchdb /var/run/couchdb /var/log/couchdb
sudo find /etc/couchdb /var/lib/couchdb /var/run/couchdb /var/log/couchdb -type f | sudo xargs chmod 660

```

See the chmod section in http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Installing_on_OSX for more detail.