In my never-ending quest to make software development easier, I have developed grunt-couchapp, a very simple interface that can initialize a CouchDB, drop the DB, and update Couchapps. It's fairly simple, you just specify the database and the path to the node.couchapp app, and... that's about it. A demonstration app is included (it's just an empty app with an index.html attachment).
Pure Javascript, just so I could remember how to do it. JSHint is rockin', but Coffeescript is a divine.