# 9. Best Practices

In this chapter, we present some of the best ways to use Apache CouchDB. These usage patterns reflect many years of real-world use. We hope that these will jump-start your next project, or improve the performance of your current system.

- 9.1. Document Design Considerations
  - 9.1.1. Don’t rely on CouchDB’s auto-UUID generation
  - 9.1.2. Alternatives to auto-incrementing sequences
- 9.2. Document submission using HTML Forms
  - 9.2.1. The HTML form
  - 9.2.2. The update function
  - 9.2.3. Example output
- 9.3. JavaScript development tips
- 9.4. nginx as a Reverse Proxy
  - 9.4.1. Basic configuration
  - 9.4.2. Reverse proxying CouchDB in a subdirectory with nginx
  - 9.4.3. Authentication with nginx as a reverse proxy
  - 9.4.4. SSL with nginx