2.4. Installation on FreeBSD

2.4.1. Installation from ports

cd /usr/ports/databases/couchdb
make install clean

This will install CouchDB from the ports collection.

Start script

The following options for /etc/rc.conf or /etc/rc.conf.local are supported by the start script (defaults shown):

couchdb_enable="NO"
couchdb_enablelogs="YES"
couchdb_user="couchdb"

After enabling the couchdb rc service use the following command to start CouchDB:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/couchdb start

This script responds to the arguments start, stop, status, rcvar etc..

The start script will also use settings from the following config files:

• /usr/local/etc/couchdb/default.ini
• /usr/local/etc/couchdb/local.ini

Administrators should use default.ini as reference and only modify the local.ini file.

Post install

In case the install script fails to install a noninteractive user “couchdb” to be used for the database, the user needs to be created manually:

I used the pw command to add a user “couchdb” in group “couchdb”:

pw user add couchdb
pw user mod couchdb -c 'CouchDB, time to relax' -s /usr/sbin/nologin -d /var/lib/couchdb
pw group add couchdb

The user is added to /etc/passwd and should look similar to the following:

shell#  grep couchdb /etc/passwd
couchdb:*:1013:1013:Couchdb, time to relax:/var/lib/couchdb/:/usr/sbin/nologin

To change any of these settings, please refrain from editing /etc/passwd and instead use pw user mod ... or vipw. Make sure that the user has no shell, but instead uses /usr/sbin/nologin. The ‘*’ in the second field means that this user can not login via password authorization. For details use man 5 passwd.