Redis.io

What is Redis.io?

Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as string, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs and others.

It is used to run atomic operations on these types, like appending to a string; incrementing the value in a hash; pushing an element to a list or getting the member with highest ranking in a sorted set.

Redis is written in ANSI C and works in most POSIX systems.

Install Redis.io on Windows distributions

The Redis project does not officially support Windows. However, the Microsoft Open Tech group develops and maintains a Windows port targeting Win64.

The port can be found here.

Windows port Installation

You need a software (such as Visual Studio) to build Redis.

Building Redis Using Visual Studio

• Download the project from the MSOpenTech github page.
• Open the solution file msvs\redisserver.sln in Visual Studio.
• Select a build configuration (Debug or Release) and target (x64).
• Build

• This should create the following executables in the msvs$(Target)$(Configuration) folder:

  • redis-server.exe
  • redis-benchmark.exe
  • redis-cli.exe
  • redis-check-dump.exe.
  • redis-check-aof.exe

Checking that Redis is correctly installed

• Open the redis-server.exe, that will open a console instance and create a Redis server at port 6379 (by default). It should look like this:
• Execute the redis-client.exe, that will open another console instance, creating a Redis client, to communicate with the Redis Server. At first it will look like this:
• Then run some basic commands to ensure that the server is working:
  • First we will set a key and append it to a value, we will use the "foo" key, appending it to the "bar" value, it should return an "OK".

  • SET foo bar
    

  • Then we will try to get the "foo" key and see if the "bar" value has been correctly saved, if it has, it will return the "bar" value.

  • GET foo
    

  • Overall it should look like this:
  • Now it's all set, and we can start using Redis. For the first steps, this tutorial is pretty useful, and it can be replicated in our client.