If you are security conscious, the missing s in http:// will make you nervous. We’re sending our password to CouchDB in plain text. This is a bad thing, right? Yes, but consider our scenario: CouchDB listens on 127.0.0.1 on a development box that we’re the sole user of. Who could possibly sniff our password?
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If you are in a production environment, however, you need to reconsider. Will your CouchDB instance communicate over a public network? Even a LAN shared with other colocation customers is public. There are multiple ways to secure communication between you or your application and CouchDB that exceed the scope of this book. We suggest you read up on VPNs and setting up CouchDB behind an HTTP proxy (like Apache httpd’s mod_proxy, nginx, or varnish) that will handle SSL for you. CouchDB does not support exposing its API via SSL at the moment. It can, however, replicate with other CouchDB instances that are behind an SSL proxy CouchDB as of version 1.1.0 comes with SSL built in.
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If you are in a production environment, however, you need to reconsider. Will your CouchDB instance communicate over a public network? Even a LAN shared with other colocation customers is public. There are multiple ways to secure communication between you or your application and CouchDB that exceed the scope of this book. We suggest you read up on VPNs and setting up CouchDB behind an HTTP proxy (like Apache httpd’s mod_proxy, nginx, or varnish) that will handle SSL for you. CouchDB does not support exposing its API via SSL at the moment. It can, however, replicate with other CouchDB instances that are behind an SSL proxy CouchDB as of version 1.1.0 comes with SSL built in. You may also want to try a Docker image with SSL enabled out of the box.