2. Installation of RCOUCH on Unix-like systems

2.1. Requirements

  • OS supported: Linux, OSX, BSDs (windows support is coming)
  • Erlang R15 or R16 (during build)
  • Curl
  • Git
  • Zip (during build)
  • ICU (if not built statically)
  • Latest version of rebar) installed on your system.

2.2. Installation

Installation is pretty simple. Just run the command line:

$ make rel

and it will generate a couch folder in rel/couch. This release is fully relocatable, so you can put it where you want on your system.

Note

make sure to install rebar first on your system

To create package for your system run make package . For now we build packages for OSX, Debian, Redhat & Solaris.

##Notes on building a truly distributable package

The package built above will still depend on some libraries from your system, so additional work has to be done to distribute it to older/newer systems.

  1. CouchDB will depend on the ICU library version that was present in your system at build time. To easily bundle this library with the package, build with:

    $ make rel USE_STATIC_ICU=1
    
  1. Check whether your package depends on Ncurses:

         $ ldd ./rel/rcouch/erts-*/bin/erlexec|grep ncurses
    
    
    If it does, copy the .so file to ./rel/myapp/lib/ or rebuild Erlang
    without this dependency.
    
  1. Decide whether you need SSL support in your package and check whether it depends on OpenSSL:

         $ ldd ./rel/rcouch/lib/ssl-*/priv/bin/ssl_esock|grep 'libcrypto\|libssl'
    
    If it does, copy the .so file to ./rel/rcouch/lib/ or rebuild Erlang
    without this dependency.
    

If you copied any .so files in the last 2 steps, run this command, so that your app can find the libraries:

$ sed -i '/^RUNNER_USER=/a\\nexport LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$RUNNER_BASE_DIR/lib"' ./rel/rcouch/bin/rcouch

2.3. Binding port 80

On most UNIX systems binding port 80 is a privileged operation (requires root). Running Erlang as root is not recommended so some configuration will need to be done so that rcouch can bind port 80.

If you run a recent Linux kernel with capabilities you can give Erlang the privilege using the setcap command (you may need to install a package named lxc or similar to obtain this command):

$ setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /path/to/rel/refuge/erts-5.8.5/bin/beam`
$ setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /path/to/rel/refuge/erts-5.8.5/bin/beam.smp

On FreeBSD all ports can be made accessible to all users by issuing:

$ sysctl net.inet.ip.portrange.reservedhigh=0