After seeing some questions on stack-overflow about getting started with CouchDB and nodejs decided to give it a go at answering one of them. Hopefully this will help other people with similar issues!

Let's start by creating a folder and installing some dependencies:

mkdir test && cd test
npm install nano
npm install express

If you have CouchDB installed, great. If you don't you will either need to install it setup a instance online at iriscouch.com

Now create a new file called index.js. Inside place the following code:

var express = require('express')
   , nano    = require('nano')('http://localhost:5984')
   , app     = module.exports = express.createServer()
   , db_name = "my_couch"
   , db      = nano.use(db_name);

app.get("/", function(request,response) {
  nano.db.create(db_name, function (error, body, headers) {
    if(error) { return response.send(error.message, error['status-code']); }
    db.insert({foo: true}, "foo", function (error2, body2, headers2) {
      if(error2) { return response.send(error2.message, error2['status-code']); }
      response.send("Insert ok!", 200);
    });
  });
});

app.listen(3333);
console.log("server is running. check expressjs.org for more cool tricks");

If you setup a username and password for your CouchDB you need to include it in the url. In the following line I added admin:admin@ to the url to exemplify

, nano    = require('nano')('http://admin:admin@localhost:5984')

The problem with this script is that it tries to create a database every time you do a request. This will fail as soon as you create it for the first time. Ideally you want to remove the create database from the script so it runs forever:

var express = require('express')
   , db    = require('nano')('http://localhost:5984/my_couch')
   , app     = module.exports = express.createServer()
   ;

app.get("/", function(request,response) {
    db.get("foo", function (error, body, headers) {
      if(error) { return response.send(error.message, error['status-code']); }
      response.send(body, 200);
    });
  });
});

app.listen(3333);
console.log("server is running. check expressjs.org for more cool tricks");

You can now either manually create, or even do it programmatically. If you are curious on how you would achieve this you can read this article I wrote a while back Nano - Minimalistic CouchDB for node.js.

For more info refer to expressjs and nano. Hope this helps!