GitHub user karthikreddy157 created a discussion: How to Disable Automatic 
Compaction in CouchDB to Preserve Old Revisions

### Version

3.3.0


### Title

How to Disable Automatic Compaction in CouchDB to Preserve Old Revisions

### Description

Hi Team,

I’m working with CouchDB and need to **retain older document revisions 
(`_rev`)** for auditing and historical tracking purposes. However, I’ve 
observed that **automatic compaction is removing old revisions**, which is 
impacting my use case.

### Requirement

I want to:

* Prevent CouchDB from deleting old revisions during compaction
* Access older `_rev` data when needed

### Current Behavior

* Automatic compaction is running in the background
* Old document revisions are being cleaned up after compaction
* Unable to retrieve previous revisions once compaction occurs

### Expected Behavior

* Old revisions should be retained (or at least compaction should not run 
automatically)
* Compaction should only run manually when explicitly triggered

### Questions

1. How can I **disable automatic compaction (Smoosh)** in CouchDB?
2. Is there a way to **retain old revisions even after compaction**?
3. What configuration controls revision retention (`revs_limit` or others)?
4. Are there recommended approaches for audit/history use cases in CouchDB?

### What I’ve Explored

* Looked into CouchDB config files (`local.ini`, `default.ini`)
* Suspecting the **Smoosh daemon** is triggering auto compaction
* Aware of `_revs_limit` but unsure how it interacts with compaction

### Environment

* CouchDB Version: (please specify)
* Deployment: (Docker / VM / Kubernetes / etc.)

### Additional Context

This is part of a requirement where I need to track **historical changes of 
documents**, so losing old revisions is not acceptable.

Any guidance on best practices or configuration changes would be greatly 
appreciated.


### Expected Behaviour

Old revisions should be retained (or at least compaction should not run 
automatically)
Compaction should only run manually when explicitly triggered

### Steps to Reproduce

_No response_

### Your Environment

_No response_

### Additional Context

_No response_

GitHub link: https://github.com/apache/couchdb/discussions/5963

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