CouchDB: September 2009 Archives

CouchDB is great. It’s simple interface means all you need to use it is an HTTP client. cURL, for example, works great. I was running into the problem, though, of having to revisit the CouchDB reference and the cURL reference to recall the basic commands.

I was going to write up a quick reference with a bunch of common cURL commands, but Tim Huegdon has already posted a great blog entry so rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s a link!

http://nefariousdesigns.co.uk/archive/2009/08/couchdbs-restful-api/

I ran into this error message for the first time when I was attempting to start CouchDB, which uses Erlang, from a Solaris SMF service.

erlexec: HOME must be set

This is a rare case where a seemingly cryptic error message says exactly what it means. For some reason SMF was not setting the HOME environment variable and for some even more confusing reason Erlang requires it to be set to start up.

I solved the problem quite simply by setting a value for HOME. Since I didn’t plan to use whatever feature of Erlang requires this, I just set it it to /tmp. CouchDb now starts up as expected.