New kivik CLI tool

I’m happy to announce a new experimental CLI tool, kivik, which is designed to simplify interaction with CouchDB servers.

Feel free to grab the most recent binaries from the releases page and try it out, or read the documentation.

Motivation

While debugging, experimenting with, or administrating CouchDB, I found the repetitive use of long curl commands to be toilsome. I’ve also found the flexibliyt of tools like kubectl to be informative (i.e. supporting both JSON, YAML, and arbitrary output formats). And finally, I have often longed for a simple CouchDB analog to tools like pg_dump and pg_restore.

This tool aims to satisfy all of these itches.

Key features

• Easier to use than curl for interacting with CouchDB
• Supports both JSON and YAML inputs
• Supports JSON, YAML, and custom template outpus
• Allows replication between filesystem directories and CouchDB servers
• Supports retrys, to easily detect when a server becomes available

Development status

While I believe the features most likely to be useful are implemented, some features are still completely unimplemented (see the TODO list). There are also likely bugs, as well as inconsistencies. Bug reports are very welcome!

All feedback is welcome!