On the IBM Developer Blog they've posted a new article from Lorna Mitchell helping you get started with CouchDB and Guzzle, making use of this popular HTTP client package to interface with CouchDB's HTTP interface quickly and easily.

In today’s post, we’ll look at how we can use CouchDB in our PHP applications, using the excellent PHP HTTP library Guzzle. Guzzle is a modern, PSR-7 compliant object-oriented PHP library that handles all aspects of HTTP in a correct and — importantly, a scalable — way. So it’s a great way to add any HTTP-interfaced services into your application (PHP 5.5 and later, does support PHP 7).

She then starts off with the installation of Guzzle via Composer and some sample code to make the initial connection to the CouchDB server (either local or remote). With the connection up and working and a "welcome" banner returned, she shows some simple operations like:

• getting a list of all databases
• creating a new database
• inserting and selecting data
• updating and deleting data

Code is provided for each of these and, thankfully, Guzzle makes it a pretty simple process and handles most of the heavy lifting on the HTTP requests for you.