Hello and welcome to this edition of the CouchDB Digest — a short collection of articles, videos and more shared during the month of March. In this issue you’ll find a legacy version exploit walkthrough, tips for CouchDB observation and a kanban board that uses IBM’s Cloudant and CouchDB.

And an update from CouchDB’s sibling technology, PouchDB:

• Join our fortnightly PouchDB triage sessions in the #pouchdb channel and help us tidy the backlog and make some wins:
  • April 13, 2026 from 3–4pm UTC
  • April 27, 2026 from 8–9am UTC
  • May 11, 2026 from 3–4pm UTC

Blog Articles

• Matthew Tyson acknowledges the way PouchDB paved for browser-side databases and examines more recent developments in the local-first space [Matthew Tyson for InfoWorld] 

• Apache CouchDB 1.6.0 was vulnerable to remote code execution (RCE); security researcher Hasnain Abid provides a walkthrough of exploiting CVE‑2017‑12636 [Hasnain Abid on Medium]

• We posted about OpenTelemetry’s CouchDB receiver previously, now Ankit Anand shows us how to use the receiver with SigNoz [Ankit Anand on DEV]

Videos

• J. Chris Anderson talks about how and why CouchDB became part of their journey to Vibes DIY [J. Chris Anderson on YouTube]

Misc

• Michael Larabel conducts file-system benchmarks for CouchDB 3.5.1 performance including both EXT4 and XFS on Linux 6.13+ [Michael Larabel on Phoronix]

• Shellyln shares a Kanban board based on a managed CouchDB server using IBM Cloudant [Shellyln on Github Sandbox]

To all community members in the southern hemisphere, we hope autumn’s colours are treating you well. To those in the north: happy spring! See you here next month. 

This month’s round-up, much like February itself, is short and sweet. In this edition we have some beginner-friendly resources, and ACMattos’ CouchDB DevOps series is especially worth a read if you want to see how others tweak their CouchDB stack. 

There are a couple general updates from the CouchDB ecosystem to take note of:

• Discussion around CouchDB 4.0 is underway if you’re keen to know what’s on the horizon. 
• And if it’s been on your list to find a way to contribute, the bi-weekly PouchDB triage sessions in the #pouchdb channel are helping CouchDB’s sibling technology make great progress. We’d love to see you there:
  • March 16, 2026 from 3-4pm UTC
  • March 30, 2026 from 8-9am UTC
  • April 13, 2026 from 3-4pm UTC

Enjoy, and as always, let us know in the comments if we missed anything.

Blog Articles

• Osama shares a beginner-friendly intro to CouchDB including data storage, what makes it special, and how to create a database and a doc using cURL [Osama Haider on Medium]

• In a 4-part series (so far), ACMattos shares their CouchDB DevOps learnings and why they went all-in with Apache Camel instead of Logstash for their local Elastic Stack [ACMattos Blog]

• @nawazdhandala shares tips for running CouchDB in Docker and setting up replication, including a backup strategy [@nawazdhandala on OneUptime blog]

Videos

• This mini-doc about local-first software explains why local tools offers both a better user experience and represents a shift in values around data ownership [CultRepo on YouTube]

Misc

• The Local First Conf has opened the second conference edition’s call for papers. In 2025, both PouchDB and CouchDB were incredibly well-received in the workshop session and main stage respectively [Local First Conf] 

Tools

• Grafana has authored and shared a tool to monitor CouchDB deployments [Grafana Labs]

That’s a wrap on February! Thank you for keeping up with CouchDB, we’ll see you here next month.