A Database for the Web

CouchDB is a database that completely embraces the web. Store your data with JSON documents. Access your documents with your web browser, via HTTP. Query, combine, and transform your documents with JavaScript. CouchDB works well with modern web and mobile apps. You can even serve web apps directly out of CouchDB. And you can distribute your data, or your apps, efficiently using CouchDB's incremental replication. CouchDB supports master-master setups with automatic conflict detection.

CouchDB comes with a suite of features, such as on-the-fly document transformation and real-time change notifications, that makes web app development a breeze. It even comes with an easy to use web administration console. You guessed it, served up directly out of CouchDB! We care a lot about distributed scaling. CouchDB is highly available and partition tolerant, but is also eventually consistent. And we care a lot about your data. CouchDB has a fault-tolerant storage engine that puts the safety of your data first.

See the introduction, technical overview, or one of the guides for more information.

Want to Contribute?

CouchDB is an open source project. And that means everything, from this website to the core of the database itself, has been contributed by passionate, helpful individuals (such as yourself) who liked what they saw and wanted to make something better of it. So if you like what you see, and want to make something better of it, we'd like to see your contributions. It doesn't matter how familiar you are with CouchDB, or whether you know how to program Erlang. There are plenty of ways to be helpful! Just ask!

Our community is our most valuable asset, and it could always do with a bit more love and attention. One of the first things you should do is actually use CouchDB, and get to know it, read about it, evangelise it, and engage with the wider community. Arrange a meetup, give a talk, publicize your use and let people know how you use CouchDB in the wild. You could also get stuck in on the user mailing list or IRC channel, helping new users with their problems. Or come join us on the developer mailing list and lets us know how else you think you can help. There's bound to be someone to point you in the right direction.

Why don't you check out JIRA and help us triage some of those issues? Or maybe you'd like to help us keep the wiki up-to-date? If you're looking for something a little more technical, you could help us with our documentation, QA, packaging, mobile, or release efforts, perhaps? Just drop by on the developer mailing list and let us know what you want to do. There's enough room for any sort of contribution!

Do you want to contribute code? Great! There's lots of stuff to work on. Don't know Erlang? Join the Erlang list, and learn you some Erlang in a friendly environment! You can use JIRA to find easy, medium, and hard issues to work on. Or, if you'd prefer, just open a new issue, and attach your patch. Don't want to use JIRA? Fork us on GitHub and send a pull request. Why don't you check out the contributor workflow guide?