Installing Couchbase

There are two editions of Couchbase available for download — Community and Enterprise. While both editions are largely the same, there are two key differences. The Community Edition is free to use for development and in your production systems. However, there is no guarantee that patches (critical or small) will be made to this build in a timely manner. This edition is intended primarily for development, or for those developers who are okay with relying on free support (that is, the Couchbase forums).

The Couchbase Server Enterprise Edition requires the acceptance of an End User License Agreement (EULA), with the user agreeing to install it on no more than two production nodes. Use of more than two nodes requires the purchase of a support license. There are a variety of support levels available. Enterprise Edition also receives priority patches and new features ahead of the Community Edition. It is recommended for use in mission-critical systems.

For the examples in this book, there are no meaningful differences between the two editions. As such, we'll use the Community Edition. How you install Couchbase Server will depend on your operating system. Once it is installed, maintaining and developing the server is generally the same experience on both Windows and Linux.

To get started, open your browser and go to http://www.couchbase.com/download. Here, you'll find the latest binaries. At the time of writing this book, the latest Enterprise Edition is 2.5.1 and the latest Community Edition is 2.2.0.

sudodpkg -icouchbase-server-enterprise_2.2.0_x86_64.deb

sudo rpm --install couchbase-server-enterprise_2.2.0_x86_64.rpm

Installing Couchbase on Windows

For Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows Server, there is a setup program. Simply download the installer, run the .exe file, and follow the steps of the wizard. When you install Couchbase on a Windows machine, you'll see the following prompt:

Ephemeral port warning

By default, the highest port number that TCP may assign to an application requesting a user port is 5000 on Windows systems. This value is generally sufficient for development purposes, but in production deployments, Couchbase requires a greater number. For the purpose of this book, leaving your default settings as they are is safe.