I’m still coming up to speed on Couchbase, but from my testing it appears that the sync gateway exposes the bucket as a Couchdb database, so you should be able to use a Couchdb client instead of the Couchbase client. Because the sync gateway has its own metadata on the documents and in the bucket it also appears that changes you make to documents directly in Couchbase wouldn’t get synced to clients as they would if the changes had gone through the sync gateway.