Installing CouchDB 1.6.1 on Amazon Linux AMI 2015.09.1

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This article is a follow up to my previous article Installing CouchDB 1.5.1 on Amazon Linux AMI 2014.03.1 found here. These steps should work straight through on fresh instance without anything else to do. You can almost copy and paste your way through it.

Core deps and dev tools.

1. Enable the epel and epel-source repos by editing the file /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo.
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

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

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

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

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 near the top of the /etc/init.d/couchdb startup script. 

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

ee man page for ldconfig for more info and tweet back 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.

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 via twitter are appreciated.