You may want to use the global configuration function in Cradle so you can open a connection like so:
var db = new(cradle.Connection)().database('starwars');
If your CouchDB server is not at http://127.0.0.1:5984, the object you pass to cradle.setup must contain the following properties:
Not doing so will result in frustrating errors. The cradle.setup function expects these values, meaning they will be set to null (default function argument value) if not provided.