Setting up CouchDB in Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS on VirtualBox

In my day job, I was assigned the task of building a system that could handle 2 million rows of sales data a day. We are seriously considering putting couchdb to use. To even begin to evaluate couchdb, I of course needed to play around with it in a convenient test environment. Fortunately, as documented in my previous post on setting up an ubuntu machine, I have VirtualBox installed and ready.

To setup a couchdb environment, I first needed to create a virtual machine that runs Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS. To begin, I downloaded the installer for Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS from the Ubuntu website. I started VirtualBox and went thru the New Virtual Machine Wizard. I named my virtual machine as couchdb-server and accepted most of the defaults. Before starting the virtual machine, I adjusted the Storage settings of the virtual machine and configured the CD/DVD device to mount the Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS installer(ISO). Starting the virtual machine will bring up the menu for the Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS installer. I went thru the installation using the defaults. When asked what services to install, I just chose the OpenSSH server.

With the installation finished, I logged in and installed couchdb using:

sudo aptitude install couchdb

After a few screen fulls of text, couchdb was successfully installed. I then added a few lines to /etc/networking/interfaces to enable me to access the virtual server from the outside.

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp

Next, I turned off the virtual server using:

sudo shutdown -h now

I then modified the Network settings of the virtual machine using VirtualBox. I enabled Network Adapter 2 and set the Attached to drop down to Host-only Adapter.

I then powered up the virtual machine and after logging in, I checked the configured network devices using:

ifconfig

This should show eth1 to be configured and in my case, its IP address is 192.168.56.101

I then started couchdb with:

sudo /etc/init.d/couchdb start

To test couchdb, I opened a browser and accessed:

http://192.168.56.101:5984/_utils

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