CouchDB Footrest

Not comfortable enough on the couch? Pull up footrest.

Install

Footrest is written completely in Erlang and only depends on the Erlang libraries used by CouchDB itself.

Have the latest Erlang OTP (>= 5.7).
Install CouchDB.
make
Edit your /etc/couchdb/local.ini appending the following line:

[external] footrest = /path/to/src/couchdb-footrest/footrest

[httpd_db_handlers] _footrest = {couch_httpd_external, handle_external_req, <<"footrest">>}
Restart CouchDB.

Usage

To use Footrest, throw in a "_footrest" in the path of the queries you make to CouchDB. For example:

http://localhost:5984/dbname/_footrest/_all_docs

Of course, that doesn't do anything but give you the exact same results you would have had without the "_footrest". Here's what you can do with Footrest that you can't do with CouchDB alone:

Only Include Docs of Particular IDs

Ever need to just intersect the results of a view with relevant Doc IDs? Footrest has got you covered:

http://localhost:5984/dbname/_footrest/_design/Posts/_view/by_text?key="love"&only_include=["004a33cf430771b0099ee01731eaec53", ... ,"014832b4bcca92488436b72ed67a1a56"]

Note that the results will be ordered in the same order that the Doc IDs are given, unless...

Order Docs By Value Fields

Ever need to order results by something other than the key you're segmenting the data with? Footrest makes that easy too:

http://localhost:5984/loudly_dev/_footrest/_all_docs?startkey="00"&endkey="10"&order_by=["created_at","asc"]

Future Features

Want to help out? Here are some features we plan to implement and that you might want to work on:

Result Storage and Intersection

Love Footrest but hate passing around thousands of IDs? Here's the plan: we're going to allow users of Footrest to cache results in a separate database and then use those results directly from Footrest as need. For instance, imagine you want to retrieve all the posts containing a particular word between particular dates:

http://localhost:5984/dbname/_footrest/_design/Posts/_view/by_date?startkey="2009"&endkey="2010"&store_as="posts-by-date-2009-2010"

http://localhost:5984/dbname/_footrest/_design/Posts/_view/by_text?key="love"&only_include="posts-by-date-2009-2010"