How to create a user in CouchDB

Around October 2025 I procured two second-hand Dell servers. One a Dell PowerEdge 730 with 64GB memory, 32 Intel cores for a CPU and about 6TB of SAS drives, 1 x 2-port 10GB NIC card and 1 x 4-port GB NIC card, the other server is a Dell NX3230 storage device with about 40TB storage, 1 x Intel CPU with, I think 8-cores and 16GB memory, similar network config.

I added TrueNAS for my storage and Proxmox on the other server.

After which I installed Obsidian note taking app. Well, it is much more than just a plain old note taking app such at Evernote and OneNote, its just much more. I was getting annoyed with Evernote’s cost and OneNote, well, let’s just say its Microsoft and leave it their. In any case, both didn’t satisfy my need for a note taking app that is stable and feature rich.

That said, one of the components for Obisidian is its database, which is Apache’s CouchDB. One of the painful things I found was to create and edit users for your DB, or table within the DB server. That said, here are some references of how to do so.

Create New User:

You can also create a new user through the built-in Fauxton web interface, which is typically available at http://localhost:5984/_utils/

  1. Log in to Fauxton using your administrator credentials.
  2. Navigate to the Database Management, click on the “_users” database.
  3. Click on the “Create Document” and enter the following:
{
    "_id": "org.couchdb.user:username",
    "name": "username",
    "type": "user",
    "roles": [],
    "password": "plaintext_password"
}

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