Offline-First with CouchDB and PouchDB in 2025

Summary

Offline-First with CouchDB and PouchDB in 2025 posted Wednesday, March 26, 2025 by The Neighbourhoodie Team tipCouchDBsyncoffline first A few weeks ago, we gave you tooling to quickly and easily host your own CouchDB: CouchDB Minihosting! This week, we’re providing a demo application you can deploy on that installation, so you can try that part out with zero hassle. On top of that, consider this an up-to-date, best practises demo app for Offline-First with CouchDB and PouchDB. We’re using Svelte 5 with Vite as build tooling and Pico.css for styles. Pouchnotes is a simple but fairly complete 250-line demo app that lets a user log in and take notes, online or offline, and automatically syncs them to a remote CouchDB, and to any other client they log in with. It’s a real-timey, multi-device note-taking app. It’s intended as a demo to deploy with your CouchDB Minihosting instance, so you can try out the deployment tooling and play around with the CouchDB instance and its replication abilities. Pouchnotes looks a bit like this: The Pouchnotes readme will guide you through the necessary setup steps, and the CouchDB Minihosting Deploy Readme will walk you through the actual deployment process. The Pouchnotes source is heavily commented, but if you’re interested in a bit of a higher-level walkthrough and some general tips for working with CouchDB and PouchDB, read on! Once again, our stack is geared towards simplicity and speed: PouchDB provides a concise, well-typed interface to CouchDB and a local, in-browser database. Svelte, now in version 5, is still our favourite framework for easy-to-read, compact demo apps. Pico.css is a classless css library that just looks good, works great for apps like this, and saves ages of time. Vite, well, it’s in the name. Fast build tooling. …and CouchDB is what we’re all here for in the first place. The most crucial aspect of an app like this is how the data moves around, both inside the app and also between the remote and local databases...