Time for action — getting a list of all databases in CouchDB
You've seen a GET request earlier in this book when we used the curl statement: curl http://localhost:5984.
This time, let's issue a GET request to access CouchDB and get a list of all of the databases on the server.
Run the following command in Terminal:
curl -X GET http://localhost:5984/_all_dbs
Terminal will respond with the following:
["_users"]
What just happened?
We used Terminal to trigger a GET request to CouchDB's RESTful JSON API. We used one of the options: -X, of curl, to define the HTTP method. In this instance, we used GET. GET is the default method, so technically you could omit -X if you wanted to. Once CouchDB processes the request, it sends back a list of the databases that are in the CouchDB server. Currently, there is only the _users database, which is a default database that CouchDB uses to authenticate users.