You will need git and setuptools installed.
$ curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
$ sudo python distribute_setup.py
$ git clone git://github.com/couchapp/couchapp.git
$ cd couchapp
$ python setup.py develop
And that's it. If something goes wrong, try to remove old versions of couchapp, for example on macosx:
$ rm /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/Couchapp*
$ rm /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/Restkit*
$ rm /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/couchapp*
$ rm /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/restkit*
$ rm /usr/local/bin/couchapp
$ rm /usr/local/bin/restcli
note: replace /Library/Python/2.6 by the right path on your system, usually /usr/lib/python2.6 on other UNIXs or c:\Python2.6\Lib on Windows). replace 2.6 by the version of python you are using, actually only 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 are supported.
and retry.
If you want to contribute to the source code, the recommended way is to use virtualenv. Virtualenv allows you to test and use couchapp in a sandboxed environment.
First install virtualenv and pip:
$ curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
$ sudo python distribute_setup.py
$ easy_install virtualenv
or with homebrew on macosx :
$ brew install pip && pip install virtualenv
Then :
$ virtualenv couchapp_env
$ cd couchapp_env && . ./bin/activate
$ cd mkdir src && cd src
$ git clone git://github.com/couchapp/couchapp.git && cd couchapp
$ python setup.py develop
Now couchapp is installed in your sandboxed environnment.
When yo want to use couchapp in your sandboxed environment. go in the
couchapp_env folder and run the command . ./bin/activate. This
command activate the environnement. Then you can work on couchapp or
your couchapps. I usually have a couchapps folder in
couchapp_env where I put my couchapps.