Running couchdb as a daemon on OSX

When you install couchdb on OSX using homebrew it doesn't set it up for running continuously. Whenever you launch it using sudo couchdb -b and your Mac goes to sleep it will kill the process, even if you used nohup. To make it run as long as you don't shut down your computer, and launch whenever you start it up you have to run it as a "daemon". Here's how I did it.

1. Locate the launch daemon file "org.apache.couchdb.plist" located in /usr/local/Cellar/couchdb/1.2.0/Library/LaunchDaemons or some similar place.
2. Now edit the file. I used:

   sudo nano org.apache.couchdb.plist

   and change the contents of the XML <string> element immediately following the <UserName> element to "root" instead of "couchdb".
3. Now copy the file to the right place:

   /Library/LaunchDaemons

4. Finally use the launchctl command to load it:

   sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.couchdb.plist

   (You can also unload it using the same command but with "unload" instead of "load".) I've modified the hritserver-start.sh script so it no longer kills and relaunches couchdb. If you are using hritserver make sure you have an up-to-date copy of that.