Sofa

A straightforwards, idiomatic CouchDB client.

The intention is to provide an idiomatic Elixir client, that can play nicely with Ecto, Maps, and in particular, Structs and Protocols. You should be able to store a Struct in CouchDB, and have it come back to you as a Struct again, assuming you're not doing anything too messy, such as nested structs, or trying to store pids, refs, and other distinctly non-JSON things.

Installation

Sofa uses Req for HTTP, which uses Finch and Mint underneath, and Jason for JSON. IPv6 is fully supported out of the box. CouchDB's JSON is decoded into plain maps.

Any Req.new/1 option can be passed to Sofa.client/2 when you do need to tweak things, such as timeouts, a proxy, TLS settings, or a plug: for Req.Test.

The package can be installed by adding sofa to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:sofa, "~> 0.4"}
  ]
end

Docs

• hexdocs as usual has all the goodies
• the CouchDB API should map very closely to Sofa

Sofa really only has 2 important abstractions that live above the CouchDB API:

• %Sofa{} aka Sofa.t() which is a struct that wraps your HTTP API connection, along with any custom headers & settings you may require, and the returned data from the CouchDB server you connect to, including feature flags and vendor settings. As a convenience, it also doubles as your "database" struct, as that's really only a single additional field to be inserted into the CouchDB URL
• %Sofa.Doc{} aka Sofa.Doc.t() which is the main struct you'll work with. We've tried to keep it as close to the CouchDB API as possible, so aside from id, rev, and the attachments stubs, all the JSON is contained in a body and Sofa keeps out of your way.

Road Map

While not yet implemented, Sofa wants to support "native" Elixir struct usage, where you implement the Protocol to convert your custom Struct to/from Sofa, and Sofa will use the type key that is commonly used in CouchDB to detect & marshall your Struct directly to/from CouchDB's JSON API transparently.

• server: Sofa.*
• raw HTTP: Sofa.Raw.*
• database: Sofa.DB.*
• document: Sofa.Doc.*
• user: Sofa.User.*
• changes: Sofa.Changes.*
• attachments
• transparent Struct API
• view: Sofa.View.*
• bearer token authorisation
• runtime tracing filterable by method & URL
• embeddable within CouchDB BEAM runtime
• native CouchDB erlang term support

Usage

Connecting to CouchDB

Sofa.init/1 and Sofa.client/1 are effectively static structures, so you can build them at compile time, or store them efficiently in ETS tables, or persistent_term for faster access.

Sofa.connect!/1 needs access to the CouchDB server, to verify that your credentials are sufficient, and to retrieve feature flags and vendor settings.

Req keeps a Finch connection pool per CouchDB host, so building the client once and reusing the struct is cheap. There is no need to open a new TCP connection for every call to the database.

The Sofa.DB.open!/2 call also does similar checks, ensuring you have at least permissions to access the database, in some form. There is nothing that changes over time within this struct, so feel free to cache it "for a while" in your processes if that helps.

# connect to CouchDB and ensure our credentials are valid
iex> sofa = Sofa.init("http://admin:passwd@localhost:5984/")
        |> Sofa.client()
        |> Sofa.connect!()
    #Sofa<
    client: %Req.Request{
        method: :get,
        options: %{base_url: "http://localhost:5984/", ...},
        ...
    },
    features: ["access-ready", "partitioned", "pluggable-storage-engines",
    "reshard", "scheduler"],
    timeout: nil,
    uri: %URI{
        authority: "admin:passwd@localhost:5984",
        fragment: nil,
        host: "localhost",
        ...
    },
    uuid: "092b8cafefcaeef659beef7b60a5a9",
    vendor: %{"name" => "FreeBSD", ...},
    version: "3.2.0",
    ...
# re-use the same struct, and confirm we can access a specific database
iex> db = Sofa.DB.open!("mydb")
    #Sofa<
    client: %Req.Request{ ... },
    database: "mydb",
    ...
    version: "3.2.0"
    >

Doc Usage

There shouldn't be any surprises here - an Elixir Map %{} becomes the body of the %Sofa.Doc{} struct, and the usual CouchDB internal fields are available as additional atom fields off the struct:

iex>  doc = %{"_id" => "smol", "cute" => true} |> Sofa.Doc.from_map()
    %Sofa.Doc{
    attachments: nil,
    body: %{
        "cute" => true
    },
    id: "smol",
    rev: nil,
    type: nil
    }
iex> doc |> Sofa.Doc.to_map()
    %{
        "_id" => "smol",
        "cute" => true
    }
# fetch and retrieve documents works like you'd expect
iex> Sofa.Doc.exists?(db,"missing")
    false

Following Changes

Sofa.Changes is a GenServer behaviour for the _changes feed. Give it a database and implement handle_change/2. It keeps the connection open, reconnects from the last sequence when the server ends a response, watches for missing heartbeats, and asks handle_error/2 what to do about failures. Feed options are the documented query parameters, see Sofa.Changes.Query.

defmodule Follower do
  use Sofa.Changes

  require Logger

  def start_link(db), do: Sofa.Changes.start_link(__MODULE__, db)

  @impl true
  def init(db), do: {:ok, db, [include_docs: true], nil}

  @impl true
  def handle_change(%{"id" => id, "deleted" => true}, state) do
    Logger.warning("deleted: #{id}")
    {:ok, state}
  end

  def handle_change(%{"doc" => %Sofa.Doc{id: id, rev: rev, body: body}}, state) do
    Logger.info("doc #{id} rev=#{rev} fields: #{inspect(Map.keys(body))}")
    {:ok, state}
  end

  def handle_change(change, state) do
    Logger.error("unhandled change: #{inspect(change)}")
    {:ok, state}
  end
end

iex> Sofa.init("http://admin:passwd@localhost:5984/")
     |> Sofa.client()
     |> Sofa.connect!()
     |> Sofa.DB.open!("mydb")
     |> Follower.start_link()

A ready-to-run version of this example is in examples/follower.exs. Run it with COUCHDB_URI=http://admin:passwd@localhost:5984/ elixir examples/follower.exs.

Raw Mode

Sometimes you just want to re-upholster the Couch yourself. That's fine, raw mode is here to help you:

# raw mode gives you direct access to CouchDB API, with JSONification
iex> db = Sofa.init("http://admin:passwd@localhost:5984/")
        |> Sofa.client()
        |> Sofa.connect!()
        |> Sofa.raw("/_membership")
{:ok,
 #Sofa<
   client: %Req.Request{...},
   database: nil,
   features: ["access-ready",... "reshard", "scheduler"],
   timeout: nil,
   uri: %URI{...},
   uuid: "092b8cafefcaeef659beef7b60a5a9",
   vendor: %{"name" => "FreeBSD", ...},
   version: "3.2.0",
   ...
 >,
 %Sofa.Response{
   body: %{
     "all_nodes" => ["couchdb@127.0.0.1"],
     "cluster_nodes" => ["couchdb@127.0.0.1"]
   },
   headers: %{
     cache_control: "must-revalidate",
     content_length: 74,
     content_type: "application/json",
     date: "Wed, 28 Apr 2021 14:11:10 GMT",
     server: "CouchDB/3.2.0 (Erlang OTP/22)"
   },
   method: :get,
   query: [],
   status: 200,
   url: "http://localhost:5984/_membership"
 }}

Contributing

If raw mode can't do it, send a PR, and we'll make it so. If you find yourself reaching for raw mode often, consider a PR that extends Sofa itself?

Sofa should pass credo, and also respect dialyzer, via make lint.

Thanks

To the CouchDB team, a part of my life for more than a decade. Relax.

To the authors of ibrowse and icouch, whose previous implementation of the _changes feed in another project provided the backbone that Sofa.Changes builds on.