There’s a lot to share in this month’s digest, a sign that April welcomed the productive year in full swing and that CouchDB is a part of it. There are quite a few videos in this edition, plus benchmarks and helpful tools. 

There are also two community updates to share: 

• For anyone in Berlin on July 11, join a CouchDB & PouchDB Hackday to play around with, and help others learn, these two sync pioneers ahead Local First Conf. The Hackday is hosted by Neighbourhoodie. 
• Join our fortnightly PouchDB triage sessions in the #pouchdb channel and help us tidy the backlog and make some wins:
  • May 11, 2026 from 3–4pm UTC
  • May 25, 2026 from 8–9am UTC
  • June 8, 2026 from 3-4pm UTC

If there’s anything you’d like to see here, or something we missed in April, let us know in the comments. Enjoy!

Blog Articles

• Oleksandr Prudnikov describes why they built an Offline-First iOS app with no backend — and 0 hosting costs [@grommash9 on Hackernoon]
  • Though not strictly about CouchDB it’s an interesting example of offline-first software

• abhiraj singh tomar writes up their real-time, self-hosted CouchDB with Docker and Tailscale as as Obsidian Sync alternative [abhiraj singh tomar on Medium]

Videos

• Chirag is back — this time with two new videos, one on replication and another showing backup and restore using Fauxton [Chirag Mahto on YouTube]

• Roel Van de Paar responds to a question about how to make CouchDB IDs human readable [Roel Van de Paar on YouTube]

• DB Tech has a beginner-friendly video to help you set up self-hosted Obsidian LiveSync [DB Tech on YouTube]

Misc

• Michael Larabel shares CashyOS benchmarks including Apache CouchDB 3.5.1 [Michael Larabel on Phoronix]

• Adi Narayan hosts Martin Klepmann to discuss local-first software, managing conflicts and git systems for multi-user apps [Software Engineering Radio Podcast]

• Packt have updated their offline-first 2-week course with Angular, Ionic, PouchDB and CouchDB [Packt on Coursera]

Tools 

• Railway has shared an all-in-one image of open-source Budibase, including CouchDB, for self-hosting [Railway Templates]

• A CouchDB module for the NestJS framework is now available on the npm package registry [nest-couchdb on SOOS]

• FortiMonitor has a plugin that can monitor the health of your CouchDB [Fortinet]

• An enterprise-grade hosting option is available for CouchDB on Microsoft Windows Server 2025 [Cloudwrxs on AWS Marketplace]

That’s it for April’s updates! Thanks for reading and see you again soon.