In wanting to play around with couchdb in Lenny, I found that Lenny’s official package is at version 0.8 but I wanted to test out some features from >= 0.10. Squeeze packages 0.11 so it was fairly easy to backport. I haven’t used the backport extensively, but I have noticed that Futon contains a JS error (“this.live is not a function”, futon.js?0.11.0, line 382). Perhaps this error or another issue is making the web interface essentially useless. Note that installing the backport also installs a backport of Erlang.

Installation Instructions for Aptitude:

Add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.jonmoniaci.com/debian-ppa/ lenny main contrib non-free

The install via:

aptitude update && aptitude install couchdb

UPDATE 2010-10-19:

The “this.live is not a function” problem is due to the fact that Couchdb relies on the “libjs-jquery” debian package but does not specify a version.  The jQuery “live” function was added in version 1.3.x, but Lenny ships with jQuery 1.2.x. This means you must manually install the libjs-jquery backport from either the lenny-backports repository or my repository (I have backported it in my repository — duplicating the effort of the lenny-backports folks — since I have backported a version of couchdb that relies on this package, and I think you should be able to get it all up and running with only one addition to your /etc/apt/sources.list file):

aptitude update && aptitude install libjs-jquery

UPDATE! 2015-06-04: I no longer maintain this Debian PPA.