oreilly/couchdb-guide — Issue #464: SSL now available built-in
Author: avimar
Created: 2012-03-07 15:32:07+00:00
State: open

http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/security.html#security
>We suggest you read up on VPNs and setting up CouchDB behind an HTTP proxy (like Apache httpd’s mod_proxy, nginx, or varnish) that will handle SSL for you. CouchDB does not support exposing its API via SSL at the moment. It can, however, replicate with other CouchDB instances that are behind an SSL proxy.

This is no longer true, it's built-in now:
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/How_to_enable_SSL