Hey Motty,
I’ve spent my day mucking about with this. It’s not the configuration that takes the time, it literally takes ~11 seconds for the couchbase server to start and become available, even if it’s already configured. I don’t know exactly why, but my best wild guess is that it’s waiting in an attempt to autodiscover peers before it declares itself the master.
Below is a link to a nearly complete CRUD app with scripts that configure a docker image with the couchbase server preconfigured, including with a bucket and a user. The CRUD app still needs to loop on connecting to the db until the server is up.