Using homebrew and the ruby that ships with a recent OS X, you can easily install the dependencies using the following commands:

sudo easy_install -U pyrex
brew install bzr --system
brew install libevent
brew install gpg

Optionally, you can install repo from homebrew as well:

brew install repo

The following works for a clean Debian stable (squeeze) installation (under root):

aptitude install -y --without-recommends build-essential automake libtool pkg-config check libssl-dev sqlite3 libevent-dev libglib2.0-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev erlang-nox curl erlang-dev erlang-src ruby libmozjs-dev libicu-dev
aptitude install -y python-minimal
aptitude install -y --without-recommends git-core

Note that Debian squeeze ships Erlang R14A, yet Ubuntu 10.4, 10.10 and even 11.4 ship R13B03. As of this writing, couchbase requires R14B.

To install R14 on Ubuntu, you can grab R14B source package from Debian Unstable and dpkg-buildpackage'ing it as usual.

Another (any likely preferred) option is to get R14B02 from PPA: https://launchpad.net/~scattino/+archive/ppa

In order to link with xulrunner on ubuntu (which lacks libmozjs-dev) you need the following:

aptitude install -y xulrunner-dev

and then you need to pass extra options to make like this:

make couchdb_EXTRA_OPTIONS='--with-js-include=/usr/include/xulrunner-1.9.2.16 --with-js-lib=/usr/lib/xulrunner-devel-1.9.2.16/sdk/lib/'

The path seems to vary with version. 'dpkg -l xulrunner-dev' will help you find the right path.

(if you didn't install from homebrew, or aren't running on Mac OS X)

Get the latest version from the google project page.

$ mkdir couchbase
$ cd couchbase
$ repo init -u git://github.com/membase/manifest.git -m <branch_name>
$ repo sync

$ make