Use coucharchive to create and restore backups of a whole CouchDB server / cluster of servers, or to simply replicate it to another server / cluster.

Backup archives are saved as single tar.gz file, and can be imported later to any other CouchDB server.

Useful for making backups, or replicating your database to a secondary test environment.

Using pip:

$ pip3 install --user coucharchive

Make a backup archive from a running server:

$ coucharchive create --from http://root:password@server.com:5984 \
                      --output test.tar.gz

Restore this archive to another server:

$ coucharchive restore --to http://other-server.com:5984 \
                       --input test.tar.gz

Simply load a backup in a temporary CouchDB server:

$ coucharchive load -i test.tar.gz
Launched CouchDB instance at http://root:L76mqQE5fE@localhost:38095

Replicate from a CouchDB installation to another one:

$ coucharchive replicate --from http://root@server.com:5984 \
                         --to http://admin@other-server.com:5984

Slow down replication (to decrease servers load) so that it runs in one hour:

$ coucharchive replicate --from http://root@server.com:5984 \
                         --to http://admin@other-server.com:5984 \
                         --ideal-duration 3600

Don't pass credentials on the command line:

$ coucharchive create --from private.server.com:5984 -o test.tar.gz
CouchDB admin for private.server.com: root<ENTER>
CouchDB password for root@private.server.com: p4ss<ENTER>

coucharchive spawns a local CouchDB instance locally, using a temporary directory for storing data and configuration.

When dumping, it replicates your source CouchDB server (i.e. replicates all dbs, including _users) to the fresh local one, then saves and compresses its data to a tar.gz archive.

When loading, it uncompresses the archive, has the local CouchDB instance use it as its data, then replicates to your remote CouchDB server.

For repetitive backups, you can use a config file:

$ cat config.ini
[source]
url = http://root:password@my-server:5984

[replication]
ignore_dbs = db_to_ignore, other_useless_db

$ coucharchive -c config.ini create -o test.tar.gz

To save a backup on AWS S3 and notify somebody via email:

$ aws s3 cp /tmp/archive.tar.gz s3://my-backups/archive.tar.gz
$ cat >/tmp/email.txt <<EOM
Subject: New backup saved on S3

A CouchDB backup called archive.tar.gz was successfully created and pushed
on Amazon S3.
EOM
$ sendmail user@example.com </tmp/email.txt

coucharchive uses the /tmp folder, which can be to small.

If it's the case you can try to enlarge it, for example:

sudo mount -o remount,size=32G,noatime /tmp