2. Getting Started

In this tutorial you will learn how to create your first CouchApp (embedded applications in CouchDB) using the couchapp script.

Init your application

couchapp provides you the init command to initialize your first CouchApp. It will create an application skeleton by generating needed folders and files to start. Run:

$ couchapp init helloworld
couchapp init helloworld

Add Some Web Pages

Now we are going to add a index page for our CouchApp. So we can place the index.html under _attachments. CouchDB can directly serve our attachments as static files.

An example of index.html is here:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <title>CouchApp</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Hello CouchApp!</h1>
</body>
</html>
add index.html

Push your CouchApp

Now that we have created our basic application, it’s time to push it to our CouchDB server. Our CouchDB server is at the url http://127.0.0.1:5984 and we want to push our app in the database testdb:

$ couchapp push testdb
couchapp push testdb 
$ couchapp push

Go on http://127.0.0.1:5984/testdb/_design/helloworld/index.html, you will see:

Hello CouchApp

Try out Design Functions

Now we already make CouchDB serve our static files successfully. What’s next? We need to run server side script!

Let’s try out this attractive feature of CouchDB, Design Functions. The following section will demo the show function.

Create a show function

To display our hello we will create a show function.

$ cd helloworld/
$ couchapp generate show hello

Here the generate command create a file named hello.js in the folder shows. The content of this file is:

function(doc, req) {

}

which is default template for show functions.

For now we only want to display the string “Hello World”. Edit your show function like this:

function(doc, req) {
    return "Hello Show Func";
}

After we edit those files, we need to push it again:

$ couchapp push testdb

Finally, check it on our browser.

http://127.0.0.1:5984/testdb/_design/helloworld/_show/hello

show function on browser

The full doc of show function is here. Enjoy it!

Clone your CouchApp

So your friend just pushed the helloworld app from his computer. But you want to edit the CouchApp on your own computer. That’s easy, just clone his application:

$ couchapp clone http://127.0.0.1:5984/testdb/_design/helloworld helloworld

This command fetch the CouchApp helloworld from the remote database of your friend.

couchapp clone

Now you can edit the couchapp on your own computer.