I'd set up CouchDB on one of my development servers to play around with. Part of that involved messing with Futon, which is CouchDB's web interface. For some reason however I was unable to access the interface from my local machine.

Running netstat -an | grep 5984 showed CouchDB to be bound to 127.0.0.1:5984, therefore I couldn't access it remotely. After changing that configuration setting (in local.ini) and CouchDB I was still unable to access it.

It turns out that until you stop/kill the Erlang process that CouchDB runs on, it won't reload the config file.

To achieve that:

Find the process number that Erlang/Beam is running on

ps ax | grep beam

Kill the process

kill PID_HERE

Restart CouchDB

/etc/init.d/couchdb restart

And it should now have reloaded your config file.

Answer initially found from this StackOverflow Question.