pombredanne/datacouch

work in progress. distributed, collaborative dataset sharing

DataCouch

A dataset collaboration network built on top of CouchDB. Very much a work in progress/alpha software.

Installation

This will walk you through getting datacouch dev environment running on your local machine. Please note that datacouch makes extensive use of CouchDB rewrites and vhosts so there is a bit of configuration that needs to happen during the install.

Requirements: node.js and CouchDB. To support log in with BrowserID you will need to compile Couch with this plugin: http://github.com/iriscouch/browserid_couchdb (default installed on every iriscouch.com instance). For testing purposes you don't need the plugin installed.

get Couch >= 1.1 and set up an admin user account

create these databases:

// the main database. each document inside it will correspond to a user's dataset
// and will contain metadata such as # docs, if it was forked, etc
datacouch

// user profile documents will be stored here
datacouch-users

// unique visits to each dataset will be logged here
datacouch-analytics

setup the Couch configuration like so:

httpd, allow_jsonp, true
httpd, secure_rewrites, false
vhosts, datacouch.dev, /datacouch/_design/datacouch/_rewrite
httpd_global_handlers, _analytics, {couch_httpd_proxy, handle_proxy_req, <<"http://localhost:9876">>}

add or edit the following line to/in your /etc/hosts file

127.0.0.1	localhost couchdb.dev

install node.js v0.4.8 and npm

// install node
git clone clone git://github.com/joyent/node.git
cd node/
git checkout v0.4.8
./configure && make && make install
// then install npm
curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

install the required npm modules

cd datacouch/
npm install couchapp
npm install couchapp -g
cd processors/
npm install couchapp request crypto deferred underscore follow

deploy the various couchapps to your Couch. these mostly set data permissions and database views:

cd datacouch/
couchapp push app.js http://admin:pass@localhost:5984/datacouch
couchapp push users.js http://admin:pass@localhost:5984/datacouch-users
couchapp push analytics.js http://admin:pass@localhost:5984/datacouch-analytics

start the various node async processes. these should always be running somewhere. think of them like async job workers

node provision_databases.js http://admin:pass@localhost:5984 datacouch
node compute_stats.js http://admin:pass@localhost:5984
node collect_analytics.js http://admin:pass@localhost:5984/datacouch-analytics

now you can launch datacouch:

open http://datacouch.dev:5984

to log in without browserid during development, visit futon at http://couchdb.dev:5984/api/couch/_utils and use the "sign up" and "login" buttons in the bottom right corner to create and log into non-admin local test user accounts