Redis

• Introduction
• Configuration
• Usage
• Pipelining

Introduction

Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets.

Before using Redis with Laravel, you will need to install the predis/predis package (~1.0) via Composer.

Configuration

The Redis configuration for your application is stored in the config/database.php file. Within this file, you will see a redis array containing the Redis servers used by your application:

'redis' => [
 
    'cluster' => true,
 
    'default' => ['host' => '127.0.0.1', 'port' => 6379],
 
],

The default server configuration should suffice for development. However, you are free to modify this array based on your environment. Simply give each Redis server a name, and specify the host and port used by the server.

The cluster option will tell the Laravel Redis client to perform client-side sharding across your Redis nodes, allowing you to pool nodes and create a large amount of available RAM. However, note that client-side sharding does not handle failover; therefore, is primarily suited for cached data that is available from another primary data store.

If your Redis server requires authentication, you may supply a password by adding a password key / value pair to your Redis server configuration array.

Usage

You may get a Redis instance by calling the Redis::connection method:

$redis = Redis::connection();

This will give you an instance of the default Redis server. If you are not using server clustering, you may pass the server name to the connection method to get a specific server as defined in your Redis configuration:

$redis = Redis::connection('other');

Once you have an instance of the Redis client, we may issue any of the Redis commands to the instance. Laravel uses magic methods to pass the commands to the Redis server:

$redis->set('name', 'Taylor');
 
$name = $redis->get('name');
 
$values = $redis->lrange('names', 5, 10);

Notice the arguments to the command are simply passed into the magic method. Of course, you are not required to use the magic methods, you may also pass commands to the server using the command method:

$values = $redis->command('lrange', [5, 10]);

When you are simply executing commands against the default connection, just use static magic methods on the Redis class:

Redis::set('name', 'Taylor');
 
$name = Redis::get('name');
 
$values = Redis::lrange('names', 5, 10);

Pipelining

Pipelining should be used when you need to send many commands to the server in one operation. To get started, use the pipeline command:

Piping Many Commands To Your Servers

Redis::pipeline(function($pipe)
{
    for ($i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++)
    {
        $pipe->set("key:$i", $i);
    }
});