DOCUMENTATION - Creating a new user method HTTP method is wrong

[dbeniteza]

Hello,

I've found an error on the documentation section 1.5.2.2. Creating a New User.

It is said "Creating a new user is a very trivial operation. You just need to do a PUT request with the user’s data to CouchDB"

This is wrong, since the PUT method will try to create the _users database. The correct HTTP method is POST.

Please correct this typo in the documentation.

As a suggestion, it would help to explicitly include in this documentation section that this call must be done with an admin user. Consider including in the curl example something like this:

curl -X **POST** <admin_user>:<admin_password>@localhost:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:jan \
     -H "Accept: application/json" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"name": "jan", "password": "apple", "roles": [], "type": "user"}'

[nickva]

since the PUT method will try to create the _users database. The correct HTTP method is POST.

PUT should not create a new database but a new user document

The URL is http://localhost:5984/_users/org.couchdb.user:jan _users is the database and org.couchdb.user:jan is the document ID. PUT is also the correct method in this case as we're creating or replacing a resource and we're identifying it by its resource URL path.

Maybe we should assert or include that we are assuming in the documentation that _users db has already been created and the jan user has not been added to it yet.

Good point however that this needs an admin user and admin password. That is mentioned above in Authentication Database but that may be easy to miss so showing it in the example would make it easier to see.