bitnami-containers/bitnami/couchdb

Bitnami Secure Image for CouchDB

What is CouchDB?

CouchDB is an open source NoSQL database that stores your data with JSON documents, which you can access via HTTP. It allows you to index, combine, and transform your documents with JavaScript.

Overview of CouchDB Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.

TL;DR

docker run --name couchdb bitnami/couchdb:latest

⚠️ Important Notice: Upcoming changes to the Bitnami Catalog

Beginning August 28th, 2025, Bitnami will evolve its public catalog to offer a curated set of hardened, security-focused images under the new Bitnami Secure Images initiative. As part of this transition:

• Granting community users access for the first time to security-optimized versions of popular container images.
• Bitnami will begin deprecating support for non-hardened, Debian-based software images in its free tier and will gradually remove non-latest tags from the public catalog. As a result, community users will have access to a reduced number of hardened images. These images are published only under the “latest” tag and are intended for development purposes
• Starting August 28th, over two weeks, all existing container images, including older or versioned tags (e.g., 2.50.0, 10.6), will be migrated from the public catalog (docker.io/bitnami) to the “Bitnami Legacy” repository (docker.io/bitnamilegacy), where they will no longer receive updates.
• For production workloads and long-term support, users are encouraged to adopt Bitnami Secure Images, which include hardened containers, smaller attack surfaces, CVE transparency (via VEX/KEV), SBOMs, and enterprise support.

These changes aim to improve the security posture of all Bitnami users by promoting best practices for software supply chain integrity and up-to-date deployments. For more details, visit the Bitnami Secure Images announcement.

Why use Bitnami Secure Images?

• Bitnami Secure Images and Helm charts are built to make open source more secure and enterprise ready.
• Triage security vulnerabilities faster, with transparency into CVE risks using industry standard Vulnerability Exploitability Exchange (VEX), KEV, and EPSS scores.
• Our hardened images use a minimal OS (Photon Linux), which reduces the attack surface while maintaining extensibility through the use of an industry standard package format.
• Stay more secure and compliant with continuously built images updated within hours of upstream patches.
• Bitnami containers, virtual machines and cloud images use the same components and configuration approach - making it easy to switch between formats based on your project needs.
• Hardened images come with attestation signatures (Notation), SBOMs, virus scan reports and other metadata produced in an SLSA-3 compliant software factory.

Only a subset of BSI applications are available for free. Looking to access the entire catalog of applications as well as enterprise support? Try the commercial edition of Bitnami Secure Images today.

Why use a non-root container?

Non-root container images add an extra layer of security and are generally recommended for production environments. However, because they run as a non-root user, privileged tasks are typically off-limits. Learn more about non-root containers in our docs.

Supported tags and respective Dockerfile links

Learn more about the Bitnami tagging policy and the difference between rolling tags and immutable tags in our documentation page.

You can see the equivalence between the different tags by taking a look at the tags-info.yaml file present in the branch folder, i.e bitnami/ASSET/BRANCH/DISTRO/tags-info.yaml.

Subscribe to project updates by watching the bitnami/containers GitHub repo.

Get this image

The recommended way to get the Bitnami CouchDB Docker Image is to pull the prebuilt image from the Docker Hub Registry.

docker pull bitnami/couchdb:latest

To use a specific version, you can pull a versioned tag. You can view the list of available versions in the Docker Hub Registry.

docker pull bitnami/couchdb:[TAG]

If you wish, you can also build the image yourself by cloning the repository, changing to the directory containing the Dockerfile and executing the docker build command. Remember to replace the APP, VERSION and OPERATING-SYSTEM path placeholders in the example command below with the correct values.

git clone https://github.com/bitnami/containers.git
cd bitnami/APP/VERSION/OPERATING-SYSTEM
docker build -t bitnami/APP:latest .

Persisting your application

If you remove the container all your data will be lost, and the next time you run the image the database will be reinitialized. To avoid this loss of data, you should mount a volume that will persist even after the container is removed.

For persistence you should mount a directory at the /bitnami path. If the mounted directory is empty, it will be initialized on the first run.

docker run \
    -v /path/to/couchdb-persistence:/bitnami/couchdb \
    bitnami/couchdb:latest

You can also do this with a minor change to the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

couchdb:
  ...
  volumes:
    - /path/to/couchdb-persistence:/bitnami/couchdb
  ...

NOTE: As this is a non-root container, the mounted files and directories must have the proper permissions for the UID 1001.

Connecting to other containers

Using Docker container networking, a different server running inside a container can easily be accessed by your application containers and vice-versa.

Containers attached to the same network can communicate with each other using the container name as the hostname.

Using the Command Line

Step 1: Create a network

docker network create couchdb-network --driver bridge

Step 2: Launch the CouchDB container within your network

Use the --network <NETWORK> argument to the docker run command to attach the container to the couchdb-network network.

docker run --name couchdb-node1 --network couchdb-network bitnami/couchdb:latest

Step 3: Run another containers

We can launch another containers using the same flag (--network NETWORK) in the docker run command. If you also set a name to your container, you will be able to use it as hostname in your network.

Configuration

Environment variables

Customizable environment variables

Name	Description	Default Value
COUCHDB_NODENAME	Name of the CouchDB node.	nil
COUCHDB_PORT_NUMBER	Port number used by CouchDB.	nil
COUCHDB_CLUSTER_PORT_NUMBER	Port number used by CouchDB for clustering.	nil
COUCHDB_BIND_ADDRESS	Address to which the CouchDB process will bind to.	nil
COUCHDB_CREATE_DATABASES	Whether to create CouchDB system databases during initialization. Useful for clustering.	yes
COUCHDB_USER	CouchDB admin username.	admin
COUCHDB_PASSWORD	Password for the CouchDB admin user.	couchdb
COUCHDB_SECRET	CouchDB secret/token used for proxy and cookie authentication.	bitnami

Read-only environment variables

Name	Description	Value
COUCHDB_BASE_DIR	CouchDB installation directory.	${BITNAMI_ROOT_DIR}/couchdb
COUCHDB_VOLUME_DIR	CouchDB persistence directory.	/bitnami/couchdb
COUCHDB_BIN_DIR	CouchDB directory for binary executables.	${COUCHDB_BASE_DIR}/bin
COUCHDB_CONF_DIR	CouchDB configuration directory.	${COUCHDB_BASE_DIR}/etc
COUCHDB_CONF_FILE	CouchDB configuration file.	${COUCHDB_CONF_DIR}/default.d/10-bitnami.ini
COUCHDB_DATA_DIR	CouchDB directory where data is stored.	${COUCHDB_VOLUME_DIR}/data
COUCHDB_DAEMON_USER	CouchDB system user.	couchdb
COUCHDB_DAEMON_GROUP	CouchDB system group.	couchdb

You can specify these environment variables in the docker run command:

docker run --name couchdb -e COUCHDB_PORT_NUMBER=7777 bitnami/couchdb:latest

or by modifying the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

services:
  couchdb:
  ...
    environment:
      - COUCHDB_PORT_NUMBER=7777
  ...

Mounting your own configuration files

If you want to provide more specific configuration options to CouchDB, you can always mount your own configuration files under /opt/bitnami/couchdb/etc/. You can either add new ones under ./local.d or override the existing ones.

To understand the precedence of the different configuration files, please check how CouchDB reads them.

Step 1: Run the CouchDB image

Run the CouchDB image, mounting a directory from your host.

docker run --name couchdb -v /path/to/config/dir:/opt/bitnami/couchdb/etc bitnami/couchdb:latest

or using Docker Compose:

services:
  couchdb:
  ...
    volumes:
      - /path/to/config/dir:/opt/bitnami/couchdb/etc/
  ...

Step 2: Edit the configuration

Edit the configuration on your host using your favorite editor.

vi /path/to/config/file/10-custom.ini

Step 3: Restart CouchDB

After changing the configuration, restart your CouchDB container for changes to take effect.

docker restart couchdb

or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose restart couchdb

Clustering configuration

In order to configure CouchDB as a cluster of nodes, please make sure you set proper values for the following environment variables:

• COUCHDB_NODENAME. A server alias. It should be different on each container.
• COUCHDB_CLUSTER_PORT_NUMBER: Port for cluster communication. Default: 9100
• COUCHDB_CREATE_DATABASES: Whether to create the system databases or not. You should only set it to yes in one of the nodes. Default: yes

FIPS configuration in Bitnami Secure Images

The Bitnami CouchDB Docker image from the Bitnami Secure Images catalog includes extra features and settings to configure the container with FIPS capabilities. You can configure the next environment variables:

• OPENSSL_FIPS: whether OpenSSL runs in FIPS mode or not. yes (default), no.

Logging

The Bitnami CouchDB Docker image sends the container logs to stdout. To view the logs:

docker logs couchdb

You can configure the containers logging driver using the --log-driver option if you wish to consume the container logs differently. In the default configuration docker uses the json-file driver.

Customize this image

The Bitnami CouchDB Docker image is designed to be extended so it can be used as the base image where you can add custom configuration files or other packages.

Extend this image

Before extending this image, please note there are certain configuration settings you can modify using the original image:

• Settings that can be adapted using environment variables. For instance, you can change the port used by CouchDB by setting the environment variable COUCHDB_PORT_NUMBER.
• Replacing or adding your own configuration files.

If your desired customizations cannot be covered using the methods mentioned above, extend the image. To do so, create your own image using a Dockerfile with the format below:

FROM bitnami/couchdb
### Put your customizations below
...

Here is an example of extending the image with the following modifications:

• Install the vim editor
• Modify the port used by CouchDB
• Change the user that runs the container

FROM bitnami/couchdb

### Change user to perform privileged actions
USER 0
### Install 'vim'
RUN install_packages vim
### Revert to the original non-root user
USER 1001

### Modify the ports used by NGINX by default
ENV COUCHDB_PORT_NUMBER=1234 # It is also possible to change this environment variable at runtime
EXPOSE 1234 4369

### Modify the default container user
USER 1002

Based on the extended image, you can use a Docker Compose file like the one below to add other features:

• Add a custom configuration file

version: '2'
services:
  couchdb:
    build: .
    environment:
      - COUCHDB_PASSWORD=couchdb
    ports:
      - 1234:1234
      - 4369:4369
    volumes:
      - couchdb_data:/bitnami/couchdb
      - /path/to/config/file/10-custom.ini:/opt/bitnami/couchdb/etc/local.d/10-custom.ini
volumes:
  couchdb_data:
    driver: local

Maintenance

Upgrade this image

Bitnami provides up-to-date versions of CouchDB, including security patches, soon after they are made upstream. We recommend that you follow these steps to upgrade your container.

Step 1: Get the updated image

docker pull bitnami/couchdb:latest

Step 2: Stop the running container

Stop the currently running container using the command

docker stop couchdb

Step 3: Remove the currently running container

docker rm -v couchdb

Step 4: Run the new image

Re-create your container from the new image.

docker run --name couchdb bitnami/couchdb:latest

Notable Changes

3.0.0-0-debian-10-r0

• The usage of 'ALLOW_ANONYMOUS_LOGIN' is now deprecated. Please, specify a password for the admin user (defaults to "admin") by setting the 'COUCHDB_PASSWORD' environment variable.

Using docker-compose.yaml

Please be aware this file has not undergone internal testing. Consequently, we advise its use exclusively for development or testing purposes. For production-ready deployments, we highly recommend utilizing its associated Bitnami Helm chart.

If you detect any issue in the docker-compose.yaml file, feel free to report it or contribute with a fix by following our Contributing Guidelines.

Contributing

We'd love for you to contribute to this container. You can request new features by creating an issue or submitting a pull request with your contribution.

Issues

If you encountered a problem running this container, you can file an issue. For us to provide better support, be sure to fill the issue template.

License

Copyright © 2025 Broadcom. The term "Broadcom" refers to Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.