Installing and running couchdb on macosx

Question

I am running OSX Leopard 10.5.8. I installed couchdb using

brew install couchdb

If I run couchdb on the command line (in accordance with the brew info instructions) 3 processes are spawned, but nothing appears to be listening on 5984 (telnet localhost 5984 fails to connect). The couchdb process looks like this:

/bin/sh -e /usr/local/bin/couchdb -a /usr/local/etc/couchdb/default.ini -a /usr/local/etc/couchdb/local.ini -b -r 0 -p /usr/local/var/run/couchdb/couchdb.pid -o couchdb.stdout -e couchdb.stderr -R

I own the /usr/local/var and /usr/local/etc directories. The above named couchdb.pid file is empty and there is no log file.

This could be a permissions thing but I don't really see how. Any thoughts gratefully received.

Answer 1

It turns out that the problem was with a pre-existing install of erlang in /opt (as a result of using mac ports). Couchdb was running with the wrong version of erlang (i.e. not the one in /usr/local) and that seems to be causing the problem.

The fix was to uninstall the macports version of erlang and also to uninstall the brew and try again.