couchdb 2.0 installation and singel node setup - couchdb

Question

after installing couchdb 2.0 the docs ask you to to this:
After installation and initial startup, visit Fauxton at
http://127.0.0.01:5984/_utils#setup. You will be asked to set up
CouchDB as a single-node instance or set up a cluster.
This gets in the way when automating the intallation process.
What is actually going on when you decide for one option or the other?
Can the same results be achieved via API calls?
Thanks for any insights
volker

Answer 1

Of course :)
Documentation from the couchdb-documentation repository.
The Cluster Setup Api
If you would prefer to manually configure your CouchDB cluster, CouchDB exposes
the _cluster_setup endpoint for that. After installation and initial setup.
We can setup the cluster. On each node we need to run the following command to
setup the node:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://admin:password#127.0.0.1:5984/_cluster_setup -d '{"action": "enable_cluster", "bind_address":"0.0.0.0", "username": "admin", "password":"password"}'
After that we can join all the nodes together. Choose one node
as the "setup coordination node" to run all these commands on.
This is a "setup coordination node" that manages the setup and
requires all other nodes to be able to see it and vice versa.
Setup will not work with unavailable nodes.
The notion of "setup coordination node" will be gone once the setup is finished.
From then onwards the cluster will no longer have a "setup coordination node".
To add a node run these two commands:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://admin:password#127.0.0.1:5984/_cluster_setup -d '{"action": "enable_cluster", "bind_address":"0.0.0.0", "username": "admin", "password":"password", "port": 15984, "remote_node": "<remote-node-ip>", "remote_current_user": "<remote-node-username>", "remote_current_password": "<remote-node-password>" }'
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://admin:password#127.0.0.1:5984/_cluster_setup -d '{"action": "add_node", "host":"<remote-node-ip>", "port": "<remote-node-port>", "username": "garren", "password":"password"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json"
This will join the two nodes together.
Keep running the above commands for each
node you want to add to the cluster. Once this is done run the
following command to complete the setup and add the missing databases:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://admin:password#127.0.0.1:5984/_cluster_setup -d '{"action": "finish_cluster"}'
You CouchDB cluster is now setup.
Source : https://github.com/apache/couchdb-documentation/blob/master/src/cluster/setup.rst