Hello and welcome to 2026 and the first CouchDB Digest of the year! This is a bumper edition that includes December’s highlights too. First things first: have you taken part in the 2025–2026 Annual Apache CouchDB User Survey? Share it far and wide: we can’t wait to hear from you!

This month there’s also a very special update about CouchDB’s sibling technology:

Count yourself among the amazing volunteer team that brings PouchDB to the world, and join the bi-weekly triage sessions to help prune, prioritise and work through the PouchDB backlog! 

It all happens in the #pouchdb channel in the CouchDB community Slack — come participate:

• February 9, 2026 from 8-9am UTC
• February 16, 2026 from 3-4pm UTC
• March 2, 2026 from 8-9am UTC

In the last active session, contributors closed 15 issues and 3 PRs! 🙌 

These are the biggest updates in the CouchDB community. Read on for a video-packed edition that covers why local first is the future and where CouchDB fits in, plus setup tutorials, deployment options and more.

Blog Articles

• Local-first home assistants demonstrate the benefits of skipping the cloud, and Andrea Griffiths explains why local first is the future of software [Andrea Griffiths on Github Blog]

• This design guide uses CouchDB to demonstrate how Ziti Tunnelers work across distributed system using Kubernetes [NetFoundry Support Hub] 

• Steven Deobald introduces the local first spectrum and why FOSS is the natural fit when it comes to owning your own data [Steven Deobald]

Videos

• Alex Feyerke intro’d CouchDB and PouchDB at the first ever local-first devroom as part of FOSDEM 2026 [FOSDEM recordings]
  • Check out the session recordings and devroom info 

• Recordings from the 2026 edition of Sync Conf are up! Topics include conflicts, sync engines, persistence and more [Local-First Conf on YouTube]

• The Chaospager team presented their Open Pager System — which relies on scalable CouchDB — at 39c3 [CCC Media]

• Chirag’s latest tutorial covers setting up CouchDB with bidirectional replication [Chirag Mahto on YouTube]

• Get a walkthrough of setting up CouchDB’s multi-primary replication [Chirag Mahto on YouTube]

Tools

• Docker’s hardened image of CouchDB for Debian13 has received some updates [Docker Hub]

• Dokploy have shared instructions for configuring a CouchDB deployment [Dokploy Docs]

• More deployment doc updates, this time from Vultr, to deploy CouchDB via Docker Compose on Ubuntu 24.04, with Traefik for secure access [Vultr Docs]

• Cloudtrio offers a pre-configured CouchDB deployment based on Windows 2022 [Cloudtrio on Microsoft Marketplace]

Thank you for keeping up with the CouchDB ecosystem; see you here next month!