Rewrite URLs with CouchDB - url-rewriting

Question

I'm building my first CouchApp (a simple blogging engine) in order to learn more about it. Now, I have it working to the point that the following URL returns blog posts:
http://127.0.0.1:5984/couchblog/_design/couchblog/_list/index/posts
I have a view called posts that returns my posts, and a list called index that renders the posts. So I figured my next step was to rewrite the URLs to something a bit friendlier. Unfortunately the documentation on URL rewriting seems a tad vague, and I just can't seem to get anything to work.
The rewrite section of my design document looks like this:
rewrites: [{
from: '../../../',
to: '/_list/index/posts',
method: 'GET',
query: ''
}],
I'd like to rewrite it so that it serves the list of blog posts from the web server root, but I just can't seem to get anywhere with it. Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong? I'm using CouchDB 1.6.0 on OS X Snow Leopard via Homebrew.

Answer 1

I'd like to rewrite it so that it serves the list of blog posts from the web server root
I think you need to configure your vhosts settings in the couchdb config for that. This is covered pretty well in the vhosts section so I will just post the relevant part here:-
To add a virtual host, add a CNAME pointer to the DNS for your domain name. For development and testing, it is sufficient to add an entry in the hosts file, typically /etc/hosts` on Unix-like operating systems:
# CouchDB vhost definitions, refer to local.ini for further details
127.0.0.1 couchdb.local
Test that this is working:
$ ping couchdb.local
PING couchdb.local (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.025 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.051 ms
Finally, add an entry to your configuration file in the [vhosts]* section:
[vhosts]
couchdb.local:5984 = /example
*.couchdb.local:5984 = /example
If your CouchDB is listening on the the default HTTP port (80), or is sitting behind a proxy, then you don’t need to specify a port number in the vhost key.
*By the way you can do this from futon as well. Just make sure to restart couchdb after you have configured your vhosts section. Other wise changes will have no effect.
For our case however we need to map the vhosts section to the rewrite handler on our database. So our vhosts will look something like this:-
couchdb.local:5984 = your-db/_design/your-design/_rewrite
Modify your rewirtes handler as well
rewrites: [{
from: 'index',
to: '/_list/index/posts',
method: 'GET',
query: ''
}]
Now if you issue a request to
couchdb.local:5984/index
You should see a list of posts.