Install redis on Ubuntu with PHP

* PLEASE NOTE *
Consider using Docker instead!

Isn't good to have traffic on your website? The more traffic the merrier right? Sometimes we need a little help from tools to help our site be more responsive to the demand. One of these tools is Redis.

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.

Here's a simple tutorial on how to install Redis on Ubuntu.

sudo aptitude install redis-server

You will see something like this:

Setting up redis-server (2:2.2.12-1build1) ...
Starting redis-server: redis-server.

You can always change the redis config file for your needs. To do so, simply edit the redis.conf file:

sudo /etc/init.d/redis-server stop
sudo vi /etc/redis/redis.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/redis-server start

Verifying installation.

redis-cli

this will prompt:

redis 127.0.0.1:6379>

and type: INFO

redis_version:2.2.12
redis_git_sha1:00000000
redis_git_dirty:0
arch_bits:32
multiplexing_api:epoll
process_id:4376
uptime_in_seconds:46
uptime_in_days:0
lru_clock:1245433
used_cpu_sys:0.01
used_cpu_user:0.00
used_cpu_sys_children:0.00
used_cpu_user_children:0.00
connected_clients:1
connected_slaves:0
client_longest_output_list:0
client_biggest_input_buf:0
blocked_clients:0
used_memory:547620
used_memory_human:534.79K
used_memory_rss:1187840
mem_fragmentation_ratio:2.17
use_tcmalloc:0
loading:0
aof_enabled:0
changes_since_last_save:1
bgsave_in_progress:0
last_save_time:1354631602
bgrewriteaof_in_progress:0
total_connections_received:1
total_commands_processed:1
expired_keys:0
evicted_keys:0
keyspace_hits:0
keyspace_misses:0
hash_max_zipmap_entries:512
hash_max_zipmap_value:64
pubsub_channels:0
pubsub_patterns:0
vm_enabled:0
role:master

Installing PHP with Redis

Here you have 2 options. You can either go with a PHP solution or the compiled PHP module.

PHP Version

This one only requires the PHP library for Redis. Here's two of them:

Predis

Predis is a flexible and feature-complete PHP (>= 5.3) client library for the Redis key-value store.

The library does not require any additional extension loaded in PHP, but it can be optionally paired with the phpiredis C extension to lower the overhead of serializing and parsing the Redis protocol. Predis is also available in an asynchronous fashion through the experimental client provided by the Predis\Async library.

For a list of frequently asked questions about Predis, see FAQ.md in the root of the repository. More details are available on the official wiki of the project.

Main features

• Wide range of Redis versions supported (from 1.2 to 2.6 and unstable) using server profiles.
• Smart support for redis-cluster (Redis >= 3.0).
• Client-side sharding via consistent hashing or custom distribution strategies.
• Support for master / slave replication configurations (write on master, read from slaves).
• Transparent key prefixing strategy capable of handling any command known that has keys in its arguments.
• Command pipelining on single and aggregated connections.
• Abstraction for Redis transactions (Redis >= 2.0) with support for CAS operations (Redis >= 2.2).
• Abstraction for Lua scripting (Redis >= 2.6) capable of automatically switching between EVAL and EVALSHA.
• Connections to Redis instances are lazily established upon the first call to a command by the client.
• Ability to connect to Redis using TCP/IP or UNIX domain sockets with support for persistent connections.
• Ability to specify alternative connection classes to use different types of network or protocol backends.
• Flexible system to define and register your own set of commands or server profiles to client instances.

Available at: https://github.com/nrk/predis

redisent

Redisent is a simple, no-nonsense interface to the Redis data structure store for modest developers. It is designed to flexible and tolerant of changes to the Redis protocol.

Available at: https://github.com/jdp/redisent

Compiled version

The compiled version is available at https://github.com/nicolasff/phpredis.

cd /tmp && wget https://github.com/nicolasff/phpredis/archive/master.zip && unzip master.zip && cd phpredis-master/

Compiling shared PECL extensions.

phpize

If you would like phpredis to serialize your data using the igbinary library, run configure with --enable-redis-igbinary.

./configure [--enable-redis-igbinary]

Make it!

make

You will see something like this:

Build complete.
Don't forget to run 'make test'.

Then make the package:

sudo make install

This will create the module file:

Installing shared extensions:     /usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/

Then add it to apache:

sudo vi /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/redis.ini

And add this configuration:

; configuration for php PDO module
extension=/path/to/php5/redis.so

Stop and start Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now, if you create a php file with the phpinfo(); you will see something like:

redis
Redis Support	enabled
Redis Version 	2.2.2

Registered save handlers 	files user memcache memcached redis

Then use it with PHP

$redis = new Redis();
$redis->connect('127.0.0.1', 6379);
if($redis->exists('key')) {
  $redis->set('key', 'value');
}
$redis->get('key');

All the commands are available at: https://github.com/nicolasff/phpredis/blob/master/README.markdown#classes-and-methods