All intructions defined here are valid for Arch Linux.

1. Edit /etc/couchdb/local.ini as follows.
   Create an admin account. It will be hashed on the next service start.

[admins]
admin = <password_goes_here>

2. Enable proxy authentication handler.

[chttpd]
authentication_handlers = {chttpd_auth, cookie_authentication_handler}, {couch_httpd_auth, proxy_authentication_handler}

3. Enable proxy authentication secret usage and define secret.

[chttpd_auth]
proxy_use_secret = true
secret = <secret_goes_here>

4. Generate proxy authentication token to be used in config.js file (dbToken).

echo -n "admin" | openssl sha1 -hmac "<secret_goes_here>"

Start the CouchDB service via systemctl start couchdb. To stop it run systemctl stop couchdb.
To enable it as a system service (it will start automatically when the system starts) run systemctl enable couchdb. To disable it as a system service run systemctl disable couchdb.

5. Edit config.js file or use environment variables.

6. Create keys folder and provide the keys/key.pem and keys/cert.pem files. To manually create them for local testing use the commands below.

openssl genrsa -out key.pem
openssl req -new -key key.pem -out csr.pem
openssl x509 -req -days 9999 -in csr.pem -signkey key.pem -out cert.pem
rm csr.pem

7. Generate hashed password for admin user using the hashSecret secret from config.js.

echo -n "<admin_password_goes_here>" | openssl sha1 -hmac "<hashSecret>"

8. Run node dbSetup.js <hashed_admin_password> to create admin user and db indexes.