Couchbase Server has a an extensive REST API that you can use to manage and administrate just about every aspect of Couchbase Server. For this blog post, I’m going to focus on the Full Text Search (FTS) API. I’m going to show this because:

I’m not going to cover FTS in detail: I invite you to check out past blog posts on FTS, and this short video demonstrating full text search.

When you initially create an FTS index, you will probably use the built-in FTS UI in the Couchbase Console. This is fine when you are doing the initial development, but it’s not practical if you want to share this index with your team, automate deployment, or take advantage of source control.

Fortunately, you can use the "Show index definition JSON" feature to see the JSON data that makes up the index definition. You can also have Couchbase Console generate the curl method for you.

Well, if you’re using curl, that’s very convenient. Here’s an example:

You can copy/paste that into a script, and check the script into source control. But what if you don’t use curl?

First, create a new PowerShell script. I called mine createFtsIndex.ps1. All this PowerShell script is going to do is create an FTS index on an existing bucket.

You can start by pasting the "curl" command into this file. The bulk of this command is the JSON definition, which will be exactly the same.

Let’s breakdown the rest of the curl command to see what’s happening:

PowerShell’s Invoke-WebRequest can do all this stuff too, but the syntax is a bit different. Let’s step through the equivalents:

PowerShell expects a "dictionary" that contains headers. The syntax for a literal dictionary in PowerShell is:

@{"key1"="value1"; "key2"="value2"}

So then, to specify Content-Type:

-Headers @{"Content-Type"="application/json"}

One thing that the curl output did not generate is the authentication information that you need to make a request to the API. With curl, you can specify basic authentication by adding the username/password to the URL. It will then translate it into the appropriate Basic Auth headers.

With PowerShell, it appears you have to do that yourself. My local Couchbase Server has credentials "Administrator" and "password" (please don’t use those in production). Those need to be encoded into Base64 and added to the headers.

Then the full Headers dictionary looks like this:

-Headers @{"Authorization" = "Basic "+[System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes("Administrator:password")); "Content-Type"="application/json"}

You might think that’s a bit noisy, and I agree. If you know a cleaner way to do this, I’m dying to know. Please leave a comment.

To execute the script, simply type .\createFtsIndex.ps1 at the PowerShell command line.

You’re now ready to make this a part of your deployment.

PowerShell is a handy tool for scripting and automation. It’s used by Azure, Octopus Deploy, and anywhere Windows is running. Use PowerShell to automate Couchbase REST API calls for things like Full Text Search indexes, and your team will thank you.

Need help? Reach out to me with questions by leaving a comment below or finding me on Twitter @mgroves.