Store Files in a CouchDB

There is a very convenient way to store files inside CouchDB and be able to get them directly from it.

In a simple way, an attachment is a new field in a document. Lets say we have a document with id e5f46d968b31e400b5db6426d000024b.

$ curl -X GET http://admin:[email protected]:5984/sandbox/e5f46d968b31e400b5db6426d000024b
{"_id":"e5f46d968b31e400b5db6426d000024b","_rev":"1-967a00dff5e02add41819138abb3284d"}

and we want to attach some index.html to that document.

We have two ways to attach a file:

Attach via Fauxton

There is an Upload attachment button on a documents page

http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils/#database/sandbox/e5f46d968b31e400b5db6426d000024b

fauxton-attachement-1 image

Attach via curl

curl -vX PUT http://127.0.0.1:5984/sandbox/e5f46d968b31e400b5db6426d000024b/index.html?rev=1-967a00dff5e02add41819138abb3284d --data-binary @index.html -H "ContentType: text/html"

Attachment structure

As a result, we will have an additional field _attachments which will contain all files that we attached. In our case, it's index.html only.

{
  "_id": "e5f46d968b31e400b5db6426d000024b",
  "_rev": "2-83c73b6b3427d2bb5a8fc5492c6320f8",
  "_attachments": {
    "index.html": {
      "content_type": "text/html",
      "revpos": 2,
      "digest": "md5-MyN94QzefBF07zIZQ7D4jg==",
      "length": 14,
      "stub": true
    }
  }
}

It's super easy to get and it's accessible as a simple page

curl -X GET http://admin:[email protected]:5984/sandbox/e5f46d968b31e400b5db6426d000024b/index.html
<html></html>