Are you looking for a no-nonsense way to install all of these applications and don’t want to dig through any documentation? Just run this list of commands (replacing the word CORES for the number of cores you have):
git clone https://github.com/joyent/node.git
cd node
export JOBS=CORES # optional, sets number of parallel commands.
mkdir ~/local
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/node
make -jCORES
make install
cd ..
git clone git://github.com/apache/couchdb.git
cd couchdb
sudo apt-get install automake
sudo apt-get install libmozjs-dev
sudo apt-get install libicu-dev
sudo apt-get install erlang
./bootstrap
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/couchdb
make -jCORES
make install
After that, update your path in .bashrc by adding this line to the bottom:
export PATH=$HOME/local/node/bin:$HOME/local/couchdb/bin:$PATH
Now, you can run both NodeJS and CouchDB from anywhere once you log out and log back in again. Finally, installing npm is just one more step:
curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh
That’s it, you’ve now got all of the latest code installed. To start couchdb run
couchdb -b
from anywhere and connect to Futon locally via http://localhost:5984/_utils/. BTW, to use CouchDB from NodeJS I recommend Cradle.