About Redis

Redis is a key-value store similar to memcached. It differs in several key ways:

• Data can be saved to disk
• Redis can store, manage, and query data structures, such as lists, hashes, and sets.
• Redis does not automatically expire data when it is full

Similar to memcached, all keys and any value stored in Redis (including those in data structures) is a string. To store Ruby objects, values must be serialized or marshalled.

Redis can also be used to power the popular background job libary, Resque.

Learn more about Redis on Heroku

Using Redis as a key-value store

This example app demonstrates using Redis as a storage engine using the redis-store gem for all Rails caching, demonstrated using fragment caching. Set up this way, Redis will handle caching for page, action, fragment, and session caching. You can also use it directly using Rails.cache calls.

• Configuration: config/application.rb, config/initializers/session_store.rb
• Fragment caching: app/views/items/index.html.erb
• Cache expiration: app/sweepers/item_sweeper.rb

When an item is added to the database, the fragment is cleared and must be regenerated the next time the page is viewed. The data is loaded from the database to do so.

To learn more about this type of caching, see the Caching with Rails Guide.

Using Redis as a data structure server

A more advanced usage is to use Redis directly to manage data structures. In this app, we demonstrate adding items to a list. Since Redis stores strings, we Marshal the items when storing and fetching from the cache. The advantage to this approach is the cache can be updated directly, so the database never needs to be queried. However, handling updates and deletes is more challenging.

• Configuration: config/initializers/redis.rb
• Loading data from Redis: app/controllers/items_controller.rb
• Updating Redis list: app/sweepers/item_sweeper.rb
• Printing results: app/views/items/index.html.erb

Running on Bamboo

The bamboo branch of this project is designed to run on Bamboo.

git checkout bamboo
heroku apps:create --stack bamboo-mri-1.9.2
heroku addons:add redistogo:nano
git push heroku bamboo:master
heroku rake db:migrate
heroku restart

A running example can be seen at http://redis-example-bamboo.heroku.com/

Running on Cedar

The master branch of this project is designed to run on Cedar.

git checkout master
heroku apps:create --stack cedar
heroku addons:add redistogo:nano
git push heroku master
heroku run rake db:migrate
heroku restart

A running example can be seen at http://redis-example-cedar.herokuapp.com/

Running locally

1. Install redis
2. bundle install
3. rake db:migrate
4. rails server