3.5.2

Dear community,

Apache CouchDB® 3.5.2 has been released and is available for download.

https://couchdb.apache.org/#download

Pre-built packages for Windows, macOS, Debian/Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS are available.

CouchDB 3.5.2 is a maintenance release, and was originally published on 2026-05-19.

The community would like to thank all contributors for their part in making this release, from the smallest bug report or patch to major contributions in code, design, or marketing, we couldn’t have done it without you!

See the official release notes document for an exhaustive list of all changes:

    https://docs.couchdb.org/en/stable/whatsnew/3.5.html

Release Notes highlights:

  – Includes JSON library Jiffy 2.0 which includes major performance improvements: https://github.com/davisp/jiffy/releases/tag/2.0.0.

  – Nouveau: faster index building, updated to Lucene 10, old indexes remain working. Requires Java 21.

  – QuickJS updates. Memory leak fixes, use-after-free fixes in workers and regex, regex memory blowup fix, Unicode 17 support, FP16 support, optimised string operations, faster context creation, closure optimisation, iterator improvements.

  – Mac versions no longer include the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine.

Apache CouchDB® lets you access your data where you need it. The Couch Replication Protocol is implemented in a variety of projects and products that span every imaginable computing environment from globally distributed server-clusters, over mobile phones to web browsers.

Store your data safely, on your own servers, or with any leading cloud provider. Your web- and native applications love CouchDB, because it speaks JSON natively and supports binary data for all your data storage needs.

The Couch Replication Protocol lets your data flow seamlessly between server clusters to mobile phones and web browsers, enabling a compelling offline-first user-experience while maintaining high performance and strong reliability. CouchDB comes with a developer-friendly query language, and optionally MapReduce for simple, efficient, and comprehensive data retrieval.

On behalf of the CouchDB PMC,
Jan Lehnardt
—

CouchDB Digest — April 2026

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]

Misc

Tools 

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