Installing CouchDB on Ubuntu

First off, the only reason I'm installing on Ubuntu is that the Windows install is painful. See

For installation, the CouchDB wiki is sufficient.

http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Installing_on_Ubuntu

However, I dislike running services as root. Instead, it's better to create a CouchDB user.

I used the following instructions to create the user:

http://johnpaulett.com/2007/12/24/couchdb-on-ubuntu/

sudo adduser couchdb
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
sudo chown -R couchdb /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
sudo chown -R couchdb /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/var/run
sudo chown -R couchdb /usr/local/var/run

I did accidentally run couchdb as root and just had to execute the chown commands again.

You can see whether couchdb works by pointing a browser at your server on port 5984. The output should be something like:

{"couchdb":"Welcome","version":"0.10.1"}