Jack Wallen walks you through installing and configuring a single-node Redis server for your in-memory database server needs.
Redis is an open-source, in-memory key-value store that can be used as a powerful database server. Redis supports numerous data structures, such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, bitmaps, sorted sets and much more. And given that Redis stores everything in-memory, it’s blazingly fast. The one caveat to this is you’ll want to install it on a server with a fairly large amount of RAM.
What I’m going to do here is walk you through the process of getting a single node Redis server up and running. In a later tutorial, we’ll discuss setting up a Redis cluster, so you can gain high availability with your server.
Until then, let’s get that single instance server up and running.
SEE: Hiring Kit: Database engineer (TechRepublic Premium)
What you’ll need
I’ll be demonstrating with Ubuntu Server 22.04, so you’ll need an instance of that Linux distribution up and running—although you can install it on 20.04 as well—and a user with sudo privileges.
That’s it. Let’s get to work.
How to install Redis
The first thing you’ll want to do is update Ubuntu Server with the commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
If the kernel gets upgraded in the process, you’ll need to restart the machine, so the changes take effect.
Once the upgrade is complete, install Redis with:
sudo apt-get install redis-server -y
The installation shouldn’t take too much time. Before you start/enable the server, let’s take care of a couple of configurations.
How to configure Redis
Open the Redis configuration file with the command:
sudo nano /etc/redis/redis.conf
Look for the following line:
bind 127.0.0.1 ::1
We’ll configure Redis, so it listens on the IP address of the hosting server by changing that line to (editing it to reflect your server’s IP address):
bind 192.168.1.22 ::1
Next, look for the line:
supervised no
Change that line to:
supervised systemd
Save and close the file.
How to start and enable Redis
Redis is probably already running, so what we’ll do is restart it, so the configuration changes take effect, with the command:
sudo systemctl restart redis-server
Next, enable Redis, so it starts at boot with the command:
sudo systemctl enable redis-server
Verify that Redis is running with the command:
sudo systemctl status redis-server
Test to make sure Redis is listening with the command:
redis-cli -h 192.168.1.22 -p 6397
You should now find yourself on the Redis console. Test it with:
ping “Hello, TechRepublic!”
You should see “Hello, TechRepublic!” in the output.
Congratulations, you now have a Redis in-memory database server up and running. Next time around we’ll configure this for a cluster and join a node. Until then, you can start learning your way around the Redis command-line interface (CLI) by reading the official documentation.
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