This application is a showcase of the basic CouchDB database features.
It allows you to populate a sample database with contacts, example view definitions to query the data, as well as _show and _list functions to transform the documents and queries into another format (HTML, vCard and CSV).
After installation, your application should be available here: http://localhost:5984/addressbook/_design/person/_list/all/all.
You will need a working and running CouchDB version 1.0.1 or higher, a Ruby interpreter and a Rubygems packaging system.
First make sure that you have the Bundler gem installed:
$ gem list bundler
If not, install it:
$ sudo gem install bundler
Then, run the check for the required Rubygems:
$ bundle list
And install thosse missing:
$ bundle install
Once you have the neccessary tools installed, run the default Rake task:
$ rake
This should populate a database named addressbook in CouchDB with data and code.
A list of URLs to begin exploration is printed when the task ends.
When you make changes to the code, or you want to re-populate the data, you can run the individual tasks. See their list:
$ rake -T
To test CouchDB's _changes feed, you can execute this task:
$ rake changes DATABASE=addressbook
Any changes to the data you'll make should be printed in your terminal.
All the Ruby support code is in the Rakefile file. It is deliberately very procedural, to be easy to follow.
All the view definitions are in the couchdb/_design/person/views folder.
Show and list functions are in their respective folders.
You can use the Watchr gem to continually update code inside the database after you change it:
$ watchr .push