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CouchDB is a Great Choice for Prototypes, Side Projects and Internal Tooling posted Wednesday, February 5, 2025 by Alex

CouchDB is a fantastic database with some unique capabilities, and we love it for all sorts of reasons. But there are a couple of characteristics that make it especially attractive for small, quick projects, demos, and proofs of concept. Let’s explore this in more detail.

  1. CouchDB is an HTTP server with user management, authentication and RBAC already built in, so you can frequently build entire small apps without any backend code at all, or very little of it.
  2. It works with any programming language or environment, and requires no libraries, adapters, ORMs, etc.: every resource and function in a CouchDB has its own URL, and all data is represented in JSON.
  3. There’s no need for a dedicated database admin panel or exploring your data via terminal commands: every CouchDB instance includes an admin panel called Fauxton by default.
  4. CouchDB is non-relational (remember “noSQL”?) and document-based, so you can do without schemas and migrations. This makes rapidly iterating on your data model extremely fast and easy.
  5. You can use a simple MongoDB-like query language called Mango. You don’t need to know your queries in advance and prepare map/reduce view functions inside CouchDB anymore.
  6. There’s no need for AWS Buckets and the like: you can store binary data inside CouchDB as attachments, and each one is directly accessible via its own URL.
  7. Dev and server installations of CouchDB are fast and simple. For example, getting started on MacOS takes less than a minute and has zero dependencies (no Homebrew etc.).
  8. Best-in-class full-text search with Apache Lucene is built in as of 3.4.1, and you can be up and running with that in minutes as well.
  9. CouchDB is Open-Source, Apache-backed, has no vendor or tooling lock-in, uses open standards, is well documented, and has a Slack channel for questions. It’s been around for 18+ years, will be around for a lot more, and isn’t trying to sell you anything or collect your personal data.

Off We Go

Sounds good? Let’s take our first steps with CouchDB then. Play along if you like.

Getting started with a CouchDB project is delightfully quick:

  1. Download, install and start CouchDB.
  2. Open Fauxton at http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils/. It opens automatically on MacOS. You’ll need to do a tiny bit of setup.
  3. Create a database with two clicks, let’s say favourite-animals. Or you can do this with a request. With cURL: 
    curl  -X PUT \
  'http://127.0.0.1:5984/favourite-animals' \
  --user admin:admin
  4. Pick any language or stack you love that speaks HTTP and JSON.
  5. Send a HTTP request to your CouchDB to add a document. Let’s use cURL again: 
      curl  -X PUT \
    'localhost:5984/favourite-animals/otter' \
    --header 'Accept: application/json' \
    --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    --user admin:admin \
    --data-raw '{
    "name": "otter",
    "description": "Otters are just the best",
    "reasons": [
      "hold hands while floating",
      "cute",
      "extremely chill"
    ]
  }'

There. You’ve written your first document. Getting it back is just another HTTP request: GET localhost:5984/favourite-animals/otter. Writing or fetching hundreds of docs at once is also just a request. So is indexing and querying. So is adding or removing users, and setting permissions on databases. So is storing and fetching binary data. Everything has an HTTP endpoint. It’s all just there, immediately, with zero levels of abstraction in between. There might be a convenience library for your programming language, for example nano or PouchDB if you’re a JavaScript user, but even if there isn’t: your language probably speaks HTTP and JSON, so you’re good to go.

Buzzword Time!

Now lets go over the buzzwords in the CouchDB website hero section and see how they make your life easier in our side project context:

Seamless multi-master sync, that scales from Big Data to Mobile, with an Intuitive HTTP/JSON API and designed for Reliability.

Seamless multi-master sync (aka. Replication)

This is one of CouchDB’s unique selling points, and also one that might sound a bit useless for a smaller project. But there’s a lot in here that will help even with the smallest projects. For now, just know that CouchDB makes it reeeally easy to move data around and keep it in sync. How is that useful? Well:

  • If you need to frequently reset to a clean DB in development, that’s super easy and quick: set up a seed DB, and whenever your dev DB gets messed up, delete it and run a one-time replication from the seed to the dev DB. This also makes maintaining multiple test database states really easy:
  • Got your dev DB in a state you’d like a copy of for later? Just replicate it somewhere.
  • Want to seed the staging DB? Just replicate it from somewhere.
  • Prod broke and you want to reproduce the bug locally with the exact same data? Just replicate from prod to dev.
  • Want to run expensive analytics on prod data? Same as above.
  • Want to have always-up-to-date spare copy of your data, but no dev ops budget for this project? Just set up a continuous replication from prod to some other CouchDB.
  • Want to also have periodic backups on top, but still have no dev ops budget? Occasionally run a one-time replication from prod to some other CouchDB.

Again: starting a replication is just a single request. Or a few seconds of clicking around in Fauxton. Even if you’re not running a distributed system, replication is a great tool to have in your toolbelt.

Scales from Big Data to Mobile

Rest easy in the knowledge that CouchDB isn’t some unproven hype-driven VC SaaS that can’t keep its promises or gets ridiculously expensive at scale. CouchDB has been around for 18+ years and is used for absolutely massive datasets. It scales well both vertically and horizontally, and if your little side project goes all hockey stick, you’re in a good place. Relax™. And most importantly: you do not have to change anything in your application if you grow from a single instance to a 100-node cluster.

Intuitive HTTP/JSON API

We’ve already covered this at the beginning, but let’s just repeat it again:

  • Practically everything in a CouchDB has a URL (even restarting the database itself), and you can get, set or trigger it via HTTP, be it a data resource, configuration or function of the database.
  • All data is JSON. Notable brag: CouchDB was the first database to do this, now all of them do :)

That means:

  • CouchDB works with any stack.
  • No libraries to research, learn and update.
  • You already know how a lot of this works.

Designed for Reliability

CouchDB is impressively robust and resilient. You know how most other databases have a stop command and how they sometimes go a bit iffy or completely refuse to start back up if you don’t use it properly? CouchDB isn’t like that. You can turn off your dev laptop in the middle of a database write, and it’ll be fine. It’ll start right back up afterwards, no complaints, no “unclean shutdown detected”, no need to repair the database, no need to restore from backup, nothing. It. Just. Works. Instantly.

  • Power outage? No problem.
  • Hardware failure? No problem.
  • System crashed? No problem.

Your data is always safe and ready to use as soon as you start back up.

Most other database systems are surprisingly delicate. I've had non-CouchDB dev databases corrupt just because my laptop went into standby mode. CouchDB is an absolute trooper and will just deal with it.

All processes in a CouchDB, even the long-running ones like replications, are resumable and can be interrupted as rudely and abruptly as you like. It’ll be fine. Relax™.

What else is there?

  • CouchDB is small and lightweight, not just in terms of its binary size and memory use, but also in terms of what you need to bring to the table: no ORM or client libraries, no migrations, no dedicated backup solution, no database GUI, less backend code (sometimes small projects don’t need any backend code1), which all means fewer dependencies, less stuff to learn, fewer hours spent with ops and maintenance.
  • PouchDB is a JavaScript in-browser counterpart to CouchDB. You can use it to store data on clients and sync with a CouchDB. It’s also just a nice client library for CouchDB, if you’d like to use one.
  • If you’re ever building software that needs to work offline, you’re in for a treat, because CouchDB and PouchDB together are excellent at that kind of thing.
  • There’s a helpful Slack Channel where we hang out too.

“But I’ve heard bad things about CouchDB!”

There are a few stubborn negatives still hanging around from ages ago in places like StackOverflow, such as “CouchDB is a bad choice because it has no ad-hoc queries or joins!” or “CouchDB uses too much disk space!” or “I’ve heard re-indexing takes forever!”. Some of these are outdated, some are simply misconceptions or wrong, and some are trade-offs CouchDB makes in favour of other things. In any case, these are rarely good reasons to dismiss the technology.

Don’t just take our word for it though, since we’re a bit biased. Developer Jesper Høy rediscovered CouchDB in 2024, took a good long look at it and made a point of investigating and testing these “horror stories”. Turns out: none of these problems is really a problem, and Jesper is so happy with CouchDB that he wrote a blog post about it: Why I am moving to CouchDB.

Give it a go!

At Neighbourhoodie, we’re all very involved with CouchDB: we've used it for ages, and we contribute to the project itself, so it’s no surprise we’re enthusiastic about it. However, we use and encounter other tech stacks and databases as well, and so we have a lot of points for comparison.

We’re frequently dismayed at how much hassle it is just to set up even the simplest projects. Loads of software and infrastructure, head-spinning interdependencies, and an increasing reliance on remote services can really take the momentum out of the work. You want to be out the door quickly, especially with new ideas. Every time we come back to CouchDB to get started on a demo, proof-of-concept or other hackery, we’re delighted at how fast and straightforward things can be.

And that’s basically what it boils down to: CouchDB is a solid and enjoyable technology choice, and a good option to have in your toolbelt. It’s 2025, CouchDB is better than ever, and there’s a bright future ahead.

Let’s go! 🚀

Footnotes

  1. Check out our real-time multi-user Kanban Board blog post series to see just how little backend code you can get away with. ↩

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