If you’ve installed couchdb from the Ubuntu repositories, you’re likely running 1.0.1. If you decide to build and install couchdb from source, you may have some issues with the server starting after a reboot.
The trick, as outlined here is to perform the following:
sudo mv /etc/init.d/couchdb /etc/init.d/couchdb.1.0.1.donotuse
sudo ln -sf /usr/local/etc/init.d/couchdb /etc/init.d/couchdb
sudo update-rc.d couchdb defaults
This assumes you’ve configured the source with --prefix=/usr/local (which is the default).
Re-linking the init script should allow you to start/stop/restart the server as expected.