Hur man använder Redis med Python

127.0.0.1:6379>

Här är ett av de enklaste Redis-kommandona, PING , som bara testar anslutningen till servern och returnerar "PONG" om allt är okej:

127.0.0.1:6379> PING
PONG

Redis-kommandon är skiftlägesokänsliga, även om deras Python-motsvarigheter absolut inte är det.

Obs! Som ytterligare en förnuftskontroll kan du söka efter process-ID för Redis-servern med pgrep :

$ pgrep redis-server
26983

För att döda servern, använd pkill redis-server från kommandoraden. På Mac OS X kan du också använda redis-cli shutdown .

Därefter kommer vi att använda några av de vanliga Redis-kommandona och jämföra dem med hur de skulle se ut i ren Python.

Redis som en Python-ordbok

Redis står för Remote Dictionary Service .

"Du menar, som en Python-ordbok?" du kan fråga.

Ja. I stort sett finns det många paralleller du kan dra mellan en Python-ordbok (eller generisk hashtabell) och vad Redis är och gör:

• En Redis-databas innehåller key:value parar och stöder kommandon som GET , SET och DEL , samt flera hundra ytterligare kommandon.

• Redis nycklar är alltid strängar.

• Redis värden kan vara ett antal olika datatyper. Vi kommer att täcka några av de mer väsentliga värdedatatyperna i denna handledning:sträng , lista , hashar och uppsättningar . Vissa avancerade typer inkluderar geospatiala objekt och den nya strömtypen.

• Många Redis-kommandon fungerar i konstant O(1)-tid, precis som att hämta ett värde från en Python dict eller någon hashtabell.

Redis skapare Salvatore Sanfilippo skulle förmodligen inte älska jämförelsen av en Redis-databas med en vanlig vanilj Python dict . Han kallar projektet för en "datastrukturserver" (snarare än ett nyckel-värdelager, såsom memcached) eftersom Redis, till dess kredit, stöder lagring av ytterligare typer av nyckel:värde datatyper förutom string:string . Men för våra syften här är det en användbar jämförelse om du är bekant med Pythons ordboksobjekt.

Låt oss hoppa in och lära oss genom exempel. Vår första leksaksdatabas (med ID 0) kommer att vara en kartläggning av land:huvudstad , där vi använder SET för att ställa in nyckel-värdepar:

127.0.0.1:6379> SET Bahamas Nassau
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> SET Croatia Zagreb
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> GET Croatia
"Zagreb"
127.0.0.1:6379> GET Japan
(nil)

Motsvarande sekvens av uttalanden i ren Python skulle se ut så här:

>>> capitals = {}
>>> capitals["Bahamas"] = "Nassau"
>>> capitals["Croatia"] = "Zagreb"
>>> capitals.get("Croatia")
'Zagreb'
>>> capitals.get("Japan")  # None

Vi använder capitals.get("Japan") snarare än huvudstäder["Japan"] eftersom Redis kommer att returnera nil snarare än ett fel när en nyckel inte hittas, vilket är analogt med Pythons Ingen .

Redis låter dig också ställa in och få flera nyckel-värdepar i ett kommando, MSET och MGET , respektive:

127.0.0.1:6379> MSET Lebanon Beirut Norway Oslo France Paris
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> MGET Lebanon Norway Bahamas
1) "Beirut"
2) "Oslo"
3) "Nassau"

Det närmaste i Python är dict.update() :

>>> capitals.update({
...     "Lebanon": "Beirut",
...     "Norway": "Oslo",
...     "France": "Paris",
... })
>>> [capitals.get(k) for k in ("Lebanon", "Norway", "Bahamas")]
['Beirut', 'Oslo', 'Nassau']

Vi använder .get() snarare än .__getitem__() för att efterlikna Redis beteende att returnera ett nollliknande värde när ingen nyckel hittas.

Som ett tredje exempel, EXISTS kommandot gör vad det låter som, vilket är att kontrollera om en nyckel finns:

127.0.0.1:6379> EXISTS Norway
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> EXISTS Sweden
(integer) 0

Python har in nyckelord för att testa samma sak, som leder till dict.__contains__(key) :

>>> "Norway" in capitals
True
>>> "Sweden" in capitals
False

Dessa få exempel är avsedda att visa, med hjälp av inbyggt Python, vad som händer på en hög nivå med några vanliga Redis-kommandon. Det finns ingen klient-server-komponent här till Python-exemplen, och redis-py har ännu inte kommit in i bilden. Detta är endast tänkt att visa Redis funktionalitet genom exempel.

Här är en sammanfattning av de få Redis-kommandon du har sett och deras funktionella Python-motsvarigheter:

capitals["Bahamas"] = "Nassau"

capitals.get("Croatia")

capitals.update(
    {
        "Lebanon": "Beirut",
        "Norway": "Oslo",
        "France": "Paris",
    }
)

[capitals[k] for k in ("Lebanon", "Norway", "Bahamas")]

"Norway" in capitals

Python Redis-klientbiblioteket, redis-py , som du kommer att dyka in i inom kort i den här artikeln, gör saker annorlunda. Den kapslar in en faktisk TCP-anslutning till en Redis-server och skickar råkommandon, som bytes serialiserade med REdis Serialization Protocol (RESP), till servern. Den tar sedan råsvaret och analyserar det tillbaka till ett Python-objekt som bytes , int , eller till och med datetime.datetime .

Obs :Hittills har du pratat med Redis-servern via den interaktiva redis-cli REPL. Du kan också utfärda kommandon direkt, på samma sätt som du skulle skicka namnet på ett skript till python körbar, till exempel python myscript.py .

Hittills har du sett några av Redis grundläggande datatyper, som är en mappning av string:string . Även om detta nyckel-värde-par är vanligt i de flesta nyckel-värde-butiker, erbjuder Redis ett antal andra möjliga värdetyper, som du kommer att se härnäst.

Fler datatyper i Python vs Redis

Innan du startar redis-py Python-klient, det hjälper också att ha ett grundläggande grepp om några fler Redis-datatyper. För att vara tydlig, alla Redis-nycklar är strängar. Det är värdet som kan ta på datatyper (eller strukturer) utöver de strängvärden som har använts i exemplen hittills.

En hash är en mappning av string:string , kallad fältvärde par, som sitter under en nyckel på toppnivå:

127.0.0.1:6379> HSET realpython url "https://realpython.com/"
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> HSET realpython github realpython
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> HSET realpython fullname "Real Python"
(integer) 1

Detta ställer in tre fält-värdepar för en nyckel , "realpython" . Om du är van vid Pythons terminologi och objekt kan detta vara förvirrande. En Redis-hash är ungefär analog med en Python dict som är kapslad en nivå djup:

data = {
    "realpython": {
        "url": "https://realpython.com/",
        "github": "realpython",
        "fullname": "Real Python",
    }
}

Redis fält är besläktade med Python-nycklarna för varje kapslat nyckel-värdepar i den inre ordboken ovan. Redis reserverar termen nyckel för databasnyckeln på översta nivån som innehåller själva hashstrukturen.

Precis som det finns MSET för grundläggande string:string nyckel-värdepar, det finns också HMSET för hash för att ställa in flera par inom objektet hashvärde:

127.0.0.1:6379> HMSET pypa url "https://www.pypa.io/" github pypa fullname "Python Packaging Authority"
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> HGETALL pypa
1) "url"
2) "https://www.pypa.io/"
3) "github"
4) "pypa"
5) "fullname"
6) "Python Packaging Authority"

Använder HMSET är förmodligen en närmare parallell till hur vi tilldelade data till en kapslad ordbok ovan, istället för att ställa in varje kapslat par som görs med HSET .

Två ytterligare värdetyper är listor och uppsättningar , som kan ersätta en hash eller sträng som ett Redis-värde. De är i stort sett vad de låter som, så jag tar inte upp din tid med ytterligare exempel. Hashar, listor och uppsättningar har var och en några kommandon som är speciella för den givna datatypen, som i vissa fall betecknas med deras initiala bokstav:

• Hashar: Kommandon för att arbeta på hash börjar med ett H , till exempel HSET , HGET , eller HMSET .

• Set: Kommandon för att arbeta på set börjar med en S , till exempel SCARD , som får antalet element vid det inställda värdet som motsvarar en given nyckel.

• Listor: Kommandon för att arbeta på listor börjar med ett L eller R . Exempel inkluderar LPOP och RPUSH . L eller R hänvisar till vilken sida av listan som opereras. Några listkommandon inleds också med en B , vilket betyder blockering . En blockeringsoperation låter inte andra operationer avbryta den medan den körs. Till exempel BLPOP exekverar en blockerande vänster-pop på en liststruktur.

Obs! En anmärkningsvärd egenskap hos Redis listtyp är att det är en länkad lista snarare än en array. Detta betyder att tillägg är O(1) medan indexering vid ett godtyckligt indexnummer är O(N).

Här är en snabb lista över kommandon som är specifika för sträng-, hash-, lista- och inställda datatyper i Redis:

Den här tabellen är inte en komplett bild av Redis-kommandon och -typer. Det finns ett smörgåsbord med mer avancerade datatyper, såsom geospatiala objekt, sorterade uppsättningar och HyperLogLog. På Redis-kommandonsidan kan du filtrera efter datastrukturgrupp. Det finns också en sammanfattning av datatyperna och en introduktion till Redis-datatyper.

Eftersom vi kommer att gå över till att göra saker i Python kan du nu rensa din leksaksdatabas med FLUSHDB och avsluta redis-cli REPL:

127.0.0.1:6379> FLUSHDB
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> QUIT

Detta tar dig tillbaka till din skalprompt. Du kan lämna redis-server körs i bakgrunden, eftersom du också behöver det för resten av handledningen.

Med redis-py :Redis i Python

Nu när du har bemästrat några grunder i Redis är det dags att hoppa in i redis-py , Python-klienten som låter dig prata med Redis från ett användarvänligt Python API.

Första steg

redis-py är ett väletablerat Python-klientbibliotek som låter dig prata med en Redis-server direkt genom Python-anrop:

$ python -m pip install redis

Se sedan till att din Redis-server fortfarande är igång i bakgrunden. Du kan kontrollera med pgrep redis-server , och om du kommer upp tomhänt, starta sedan om en lokal server med redis-server /etc/redis/6379.conf .

Låt oss nu gå in på den Python-centrerade delen av saker och ting. Här är "hej världen" av redis-py :

 1>>> import redis
 2>>> r = redis.Redis()
 3>>> r.mset({"Croatia": "Zagreb", "Bahamas": "Nassau"})
 4True
 5>>> r.get("Bahamas")
 6b'Nassau'

Redis , som används i rad 2, är den centrala klassen för paketet och arbetshästen som du utför (nästan) alla Redis-kommandon med. TCP-socket-anslutningen och återanvändningen görs för dig bakom kulisserna, och du anropar Redis-kommandon med metoder på klassinstansen r .

Observera också att typen av det returnerade objektet, b'Nassau' på rad 6, är Pythons bytes typ, inte str . Det är bytes istället för str det är den vanligaste returtypen i redis-py , så du kan behöva anropa r.get("Bahamas").decode("utf-8") beroende på vad du faktiskt vill göra med den returnerade bytestringen.

Ser koden ovan bekant ut? Metoderna matchar i nästan alla fall namnet på Redis-kommandot som gör samma sak. Här anropade du r.mset() och r.get() , som motsvarar MSET och GET i det inbyggda Redis API.

Detta betyder också att HGETALL blir r.hgetall() , PING blir r.ping() , och så vidare. Det finns några få undantag, men regeln gäller för den stora majoriteten av kommandon.

Medan Redis-kommandoargumenten vanligtvis översätts till en metodsignatur som ser liknande ut, tar de Python-objekt. Till exempel anropet till r.mset() i exemplet ovan används en Python dict som dess första argument, snarare än en sekvens av bytestrings.

Vi byggde Redis instans r utan argument, men den levereras med ett antal parametrar om du behöver dem:

# From redis/client.py
class Redis(object):
    def __init__(self, host='localhost', port=6379,
                 db=0, password=None, socket_timeout=None,
                 # ...

Du kan se att standard värdnamn:port paret är localhost:6379 , vilket är precis vad vi behöver i fallet med vår lokalt hållna redis-server instans.

db parametern är databasnumret. Du kan hantera flera databaser i Redis samtidigt, och var och en identifieras av ett heltal. Max antal databaser är 16 som standard.

När du bara kör redis-cli från kommandoraden startar detta dig vid databas 0. Använd -n flagga för att starta en ny databas, som i redis-cli -n 5 .

Tillåtna nyckeltyper

En sak som är värd att veta är att redis-py kräver att du skickar nycklar som är byte , str , int , eller float . (Det kommer att konvertera de sista 3 av dessa typer till byte innan du skickar dem till servern.)

Överväg ett fall där du vill använda kalenderdatum som nycklar:

>>> import datetime
>>> today = datetime.date.today()
>>> visitors = {"dan", "jon", "alex"}
>>> r.sadd(today, *visitors)
Traceback (most recent call last):
# ...
redis.exceptions.DataError: Invalid input of type: 'date'.
Convert to a byte, string or number first.

Du måste uttryckligen konvertera Python date objekt till str , vilket du kan göra med .isoformat() :

>>> stoday = today.isoformat()  # Python 3.7+, or use str(today)
>>> stoday
'2019-03-10'
>>> r.sadd(stoday, *visitors)  # sadd: set-add
3
>>> r.smembers(stoday)
{b'dan', b'alex', b'jon'}
>>> r.scard(today.isoformat())
3

För att sammanfatta tillåter Redis själv bara strängar som nycklar. redis-py är lite mer liberal när det gäller vilka Python-typer den accepterar, även om den i slutändan konverterar allt till byte innan de skickas till en Redis-server.

Exempel:PyHats.com

Det är dags att ta fram ett mer utförligt exempel. Låt oss låtsas att vi har bestämt oss för att starta en lukrativ webbplats, PyHats.com, som säljer skandalöst dyra hattar till alla som kommer att köpa dem, och anlitat dig för att bygga webbplatsen.

Du kommer att använda Redis för att hantera en del av produktkatalogen, inventering och upptäckt av bottrafik för PyHats.com.

Det är dag ett för sajten, och vi kommer att sälja tre hattar i begränsad upplaga. Varje hatt hålls i en Redis-hash av fält-värdepar, och hashen har en nyckel som är ett slumpmässigt heltal med prefix, till exempel hat:56854717 . Använda hatten: prefix är Redis-konventionen för att skapa ett slags namnutrymme i en Redis-databas:

import random

random.seed(444)
hats = {f"hat:{random.getrandbits(32)}": i for i in (
    {
        "color": "black",
        "price": 49.99,
        "style": "fitted",
        "quantity": 1000,
        "npurchased": 0,
    },
    {
        "color": "maroon",
        "price": 59.99,
        "style": "hipster",
        "quantity": 500,
        "npurchased": 0,
    },
    {
        "color": "green",
        "price": 99.99,
        "style": "baseball",
        "quantity": 200,
        "npurchased": 0,
    })
}

Låt oss börja med databasen 1 eftersom vi använde databasen 0 i ett tidigare exempel:

>>> r = redis.Redis(db=1)

För att göra en första skrivning av denna data till Redis kan vi använda .hmset() (hash multi-set), kallar det för varje ordbok. "Multi" är en referens till att ställa in flera fält-värdepar, där "fält" i detta fall motsvarar en nyckel i någon av de kapslade ordböckerna i hattar :

 1>>> with r.pipeline() as pipe:
 2...    for h_id, hat in hats.items():
 3...        pipe.hmset(h_id, hat)
 4...    pipe.execute()
 5Pipeline<ConnectionPool<Connection<host=localhost,port=6379,db=1>>>
 6Pipeline<ConnectionPool<Connection<host=localhost,port=6379,db=1>>>
 7Pipeline<ConnectionPool<Connection<host=localhost,port=6379,db=1>>>
 8[True, True, True]
 9
10>>> r.bgsave()
11True

Kodblocket ovan introducerar också konceptet Redis pipelining , vilket är ett sätt att minska antalet tur- och returtransaktioner som du behöver för att skriva eller läsa data från din Redis-server. Om du bara skulle ha anropat r.hmset() tre gånger, då skulle detta kräva en tur-och-retur-operation för varje skriven rad.

Med en pipeline buffras alla kommandon på klientsidan och skickas sedan på en gång, i ett svep, med pipe.hmset() på rad 3. Det är därför de tre True alla svar returneras på en gång när du anropar pipe.execute() på rad 4. Du kommer att se ett mer avancerat användningsfall för en pipeline inom kort.

Obs :Redis-dokumenten ger ett exempel på att göra samma sak med redis-cli , där du kan överföra innehållet i en lokal fil för att göra massinsättning.

Låt oss göra en snabb kontroll att allt finns i vår Redis-databas:

>>> pprint(r.hgetall("hat:56854717"))
{b'color': b'green',
 b'npurchased': b'0',
 b'price': b'99.99',
 b'quantity': b'200',
 b'style': b'baseball'}

>>> r.keys()  # Careful on a big DB. keys() is O(N)
[b'56854717', b'1236154736', b'1326692461']

Det första vi vill simulera är vad som händer när en användare klickar på Köp . Om varan finns i lager, öka dess nköpta med 1 och minska dess kvantitet (inventering) med 1. Du kan använda .hincrby() för att göra detta:

>>> r.hincrby("hat:56854717", "quantity", -1)
199
>>> r.hget("hat:56854717", "quantity")
b'199'
>>> r.hincrby("hat:56854717", "npurchased", 1)
1

Obs :HINCRBY fungerar fortfarande på ett hash-värde som är en sträng, men den försöker tolka strängen som ett bas-10 64-bitars signerat heltal för att utföra operationen.

Detta gäller andra kommandon relaterade till inkrementering och dekrementering för andra datastrukturer, nämligen INCR , INCRBY , INCRBYFLOAT , ZINCRBY och HINCRBYFLOAT . Du får ett felmeddelande om strängen vid värdet inte kan representeras som ett heltal.

Det är dock inte riktigt så enkelt. Ändra kvantitet och nköpt i två rader kod döljer sig verkligheten att ett klick, köp och betalning innebär mer än detta. Vi måste göra några fler kontroller för att se till att vi inte lämnar någon med en lättare plånbok och ingen hatt:

• Steg 1: Kontrollera om varan finns i lager, eller höj på annat sätt ett undantag i backend.
• Steg 2: If it is in stock, then execute the transaction, decrease the quantity field, and increase the npurchased fältet.
• Step 3: Be alert for any changes that alter the inventory in between the first two steps (a race condition).

Step 1 is relatively straightforward:it consists of an .hget() to check the available quantity.

Step 2 is a little bit more involved. The pair of increase and decrease operations need to be executed atomically :either both should be completed successfully, or neither should be (in the case that at least one fails).

With client-server frameworks, it’s always crucial to pay attention to atomicity and look out for what could go wrong in instances where multiple clients are trying to talk to the server at once. The answer to this in Redis is to use a transaction block, meaning that either both or neither of the commands get through.

In redis-py , Pipeline is a transactional pipeline class by default. This means that, even though the class is actually named for something else (pipelining), it can be used to create a transaction block also.

In Redis, a transaction starts with MULTI and ends with EXEC :

 1127.0.0.1:6379> MULTI
 2127.0.0.1:6379> HINCRBY 56854717 quantity -1
 3127.0.0.1:6379> HINCRBY 56854717 npurchased 1
 4127.0.0.1:6379> EXEC

MULTI (Line 1) marks the start of the transaction, and EXEC (Line 4) marks the end. Everything in between is executed as one all-or-nothing buffered sequence of commands. This means that it will be impossible to decrement quantity (Line 2) but then have the balancing npurchased increment operation fail (Line 3).

Let’s circle back to Step 3:we need to be aware of any changes that alter the inventory in between the first two steps.

Step 3 is the trickiest. Let’s say that there is one lone hat remaining in our inventory. In between the time that User A checks the quantity of hats remaining and actually processes their transaction, User B also checks the inventory and finds likewise that there is one hat listed in stock. Both users will be allowed to purchase the hat, but we have 1 hat to sell, not 2, so we’re on the hook and one user is out of their money. Not good.

Redis has a clever answer for the dilemma in Step 3:it’s called optimistic locking , and is different than how typical locking works in an RDBMS such as PostgreSQL. Optimistic locking, in a nutshell, means that the calling function (client) does not acquire a lock, but rather monitors for changes in the data it is writing to during the time it would have held a lock . If there’s a conflict during that time, the calling function simply tries the whole process again.

You can effect optimistic locking by using the WATCH command (.watch() in redis-py ), which provides a check-and-set behavior.

Let’s introduce a big chunk of code and walk through it afterwards step by step. You can picture buyitem() as being called any time a user clicks on a Buy Now or Purchase knapp. Its purpose is to confirm the item is in stock and take an action based on that result, all in a safe manner that looks out for race conditions and retries if one is detected:

 1import logging
 2import redis
 3
 4logging.basicConfig()
 5
 6class OutOfStockError(Exception):
 7    """Raised when PyHats.com is all out of today's hottest hat"""
 8
 9def buyitem(r: redis.Redis, itemid: int) -> None:
10    with r.pipeline() as pipe:
11        error_count = 0
12        while True:
13            try:
14                # Get available inventory, watching for changes
15                # related to this itemid before the transaction
16                pipe.watch(itemid)
17                nleft: bytes = r.hget(itemid, "quantity")
18                if nleft > b"0":
19                    pipe.multi()
20                    pipe.hincrby(itemid, "quantity", -1)
21                    pipe.hincrby(itemid, "npurchased", 1)
22                    pipe.execute()
23                    break
24                else:
25                    # Stop watching the itemid and raise to break out
26                    pipe.unwatch()
27                    raise OutOfStockError(
28                        f"Sorry, {itemid} is out of stock!"
29                    )
30            except redis.WatchError:
31                # Log total num. of errors by this user to buy this item,
32                # then try the same process again of WATCH/HGET/MULTI/EXEC
33                error_count += 1
34                logging.warning(
35                    "WatchError #%d: %s; retrying",
36                    error_count, itemid
37                )
38    return None

The critical line occurs at Line 16 with pipe.watch(itemid) , which tells Redis to monitor the given itemid for any changes to its value. The program checks the inventory through the call to r.hget(itemid, "quantity") , in Line 17:

16pipe.watch(itemid)
17nleft: bytes = r.hget(itemid, "quantity")
18if nleft > b"0":
19    # Item in stock. Proceed with transaction.

If the inventory gets touched during this short window between when the user checks the item stock and tries to purchase it, then Redis will return an error, and redis-py will raise a WatchError (Line 30). That is, if any of the hash pointed to by itemid changes after the .hget() call but before the subsequent .hincrby() calls in Lines 20 and 21, then we’ll re-run the whole process in another iteration of the while True loop as a result.

This is the “optimistic” part of the locking:rather than letting the client have a time-consuming total lock on the database through the getting and setting operations, we leave it up to Redis to notify the client and user only in the case that calls for a retry of the inventory check.

One key here is in understanding the difference between client-side and server-side operations:

nleft = r.hget(itemid, "quantity")

This Python assignment brings the result of r.hget() client-side. Conversely, methods that you call on pipe effectively buffer all of the commands into one, and then send them to the server in a single request:

16pipe.multi()
17pipe.hincrby(itemid, "quantity", -1)
18pipe.hincrby(itemid, "npurchased", 1)
19pipe.execute()

No data comes back to the client side in the middle of the transactional pipeline. You need to call .execute() (Line 19) to get the sequence of results back all at once.

Even though this block contains two commands, it consists of exactly one round-trip operation from client to server and back.

This means that the client can’t immediately use the result of pipe.hincrby(itemid, "quantity", -1) , from Line 20, because methods on a Pipeline return just the pipe instance itself. We haven’t asked anything from the server at this point. While normally .hincrby() returns the resulting value, you can’t immediately reference it on the client side until the entire transaction is completed.

There’s a catch-22:this is also why you can’t put the call to .hget() into the transaction block. If you did this, then you’d be unable to know if you want to increment the npurchased field yet, since you can’t get real-time results from commands that are inserted into a transactional pipeline.

Finally, if the inventory sits at zero, then we UNWATCH the item ID and raise an OutOfStockError (Line 27), ultimately displaying that coveted Sold Out page that will make our hat buyers desperately want to buy even more of our hats at ever more outlandish prices:

24else:
25    # Stop watching the itemid and raise to break out
26    pipe.unwatch()
27    raise OutOfStockError(
28        f"Sorry, {itemid} is out of stock!"
29    )

Here’s an illustration. Keep in mind that our starting quantity is 199 for hat 56854717 since we called .hincrby() above. Let’s mimic 3 purchases, which should modify the quantity and npurchased fields:

>>> buyitem(r, "hat:56854717")
>>> buyitem(r, "hat:56854717")
>>> buyitem(r, "hat:56854717")
>>> r.hmget("hat:56854717", "quantity", "npurchased")  # Hash multi-get
[b'196', b'4']

Now, we can fast-forward through more purchases, mimicking a stream of purchases until the stock depletes to zero. Again, picture these coming from a whole bunch of different clients rather than just one Redis instance:

>>> # Buy remaining 196 hats for item 56854717 and deplete stock to 0
>>> for _ in range(196):
...     buyitem(r, "hat:56854717")
>>> r.hmget("hat:56854717", "quantity", "npurchased")
[b'0', b'200']

Now, when some poor user is late to the game, they should be met with an OutOfStockError that tells our application to render an error message page on the frontend:

>>> buyitem(r, "hat:56854717")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 20, in buyitem
__main__.OutOfStockError: Sorry, hat:56854717 is out of stock!

Looks like it’s time to restock.

Using Key Expiry

Let’s introduce key expiry , which is another distinguishing feature in Redis. When you expire a key, that key and its corresponding value will be automatically deleted from the database after a certain number of seconds or at a certain timestamp.

In redis-py , one way that you can accomplish this is through .setex() , which lets you set a basic string:string key-value pair with an expiration:

 1>>> from datetime import timedelta
 2
 3>>> # setex: "SET" with expiration
 4>>> r.setex(
 5...     "runner",
 6...     timedelta(minutes=1),
 7...     value="now you see me, now you don't"
 8... )
 9True

You can specify the second argument as a number in seconds or a timedelta object, as in Line 6 above. I like the latter because it seems less ambiguous and more deliberate.

There are also methods (and corresponding Redis commands, of course) to get the remaining lifetime (time-to-live ) of a key that you’ve set to expire:

>>> r.ttl("runner")  # "Time To Live", in seconds
58
>>> r.pttl("runner")  # Like ttl, but milliseconds
54368

Below, you can accelerate the window until expiration, and then watch the key expire, after which r.get() will return None and .exists() will return 0 :

>>> r.get("runner")  # Not expired yet
b"now you see me, now you don't"

>>> r.expire("runner", timedelta(seconds=3))  # Set new expire window
True
>>> # Pause for a few seconds
>>> r.get("runner")
>>> r.exists("runner")  # Key & value are both gone (expired)
0

The table below summarizes commands related to key-value expiration, including the ones covered above. The explanations are taken directly from redis-py method docstrings:

PyHats.com, Part 2

A few days after its debut, PyHats.com has attracted so much hype that some enterprising users are creating bots to buy hundreds of items within seconds, which you’ve decided isn’t good for the long-term health of your hat business.

Now that you’ve seen how to expire keys, let’s put it to use on the backend of PyHats.com.

We’re going to create a new Redis client that acts as a consumer (or watcher) and processes a stream of incoming IP addresses, which in turn may come from multiple HTTPS connections to the website’s server.

The watcher’s goal is to monitor a stream of IP addresses from multiple sources, keeping an eye out for a flood of requests from a single address within a suspiciously short amount of time.

Some middleware on the website server pushes all incoming IP addresses into a Redis list with .lpush() . Here’s a crude way of mimicking some incoming IPs, using a fresh Redis database:

>>> r = redis.Redis(db=5)
>>> r.lpush("ips", "51.218.112.236")
1
>>> r.lpush("ips", "90.213.45.98")
2
>>> r.lpush("ips", "115.215.230.176")
3
>>> r.lpush("ips", "51.218.112.236")
4

As you can see, .lpush() returns the length of the list after the push operation succeeds. Each call of .lpush() puts the IP at the beginning of the Redis list that is keyed by the string "ips" .

In this simplified simulation, the requests are all technically from the same client, but you can think of them as potentially coming from many different clients and all being pushed to the same database on the same Redis server.

Now, open up a new shell tab or window and launch a new Python REPL. In this shell, you’ll create a new client that serves a very different purpose than the rest, which sits in an endless while True loop and does a blocking left-pop BLPOP call on the ips list, processing each address:

 1# New shell window or tab
 2
 3import datetime
 4import ipaddress
 5
 6import redis
 7
 8# Where we put all the bad egg IP addresses
 9blacklist = set()
10MAXVISITS = 15
11
12ipwatcher = redis.Redis(db=5)
13
14while True:
15    _, addr = ipwatcher.blpop("ips")
16    addr = ipaddress.ip_address(addr.decode("utf-8"))
17    now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
18    addrts = f"{addr}:{now.minute}"
19    n = ipwatcher.incrby(addrts, 1)
20    if n >= MAXVISITS:
21        print(f"Hat bot detected!:  {addr}")
22        blacklist.add(addr)
23    else:
24        print(f"{now}:  saw {addr}")
25    _ = ipwatcher.expire(addrts, 60)

Let’s walk through a few important concepts.

The ipwatcher acts like a consumer, sitting around and waiting for new IPs to be pushed on the "ips" Redis list. It receives them as bytes , such as b”51.218.112.236”, and makes them into a more proper address object with the ipaddress module:

15_, addr = ipwatcher.blpop("ips")
16addr = ipaddress.ip_address(addr.decode("utf-8"))

Then you form a Redis string key using the address and minute of the hour at which the ipwatcher saw the address, incrementing the corresponding count by 1 and getting the new count in the process:

17now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
18addrts = f"{addr}:{now.minute}"
19n = ipwatcher.incrby(addrts, 1)

If the address has been seen more than MAXVISITS , then it looks as if we have a PyHats.com web scraper on our hands trying to create the next tulip bubble. Alas, we have no choice but to give this user back something like a dreaded 403 status code.

We use ipwatcher.expire(addrts, 60) to expire the (address minute) combination 60 seconds from when it was last seen. This is to prevent our database from becoming clogged up with stale one-time page viewers.

If you execute this code block in a new shell, you should immediately see this output:

2019-03-11 15:10:41.489214:  saw 51.218.112.236
2019-03-11 15:10:41.490298:  saw 115.215.230.176
2019-03-11 15:10:41.490839:  saw 90.213.45.98
2019-03-11 15:10:41.491387:  saw 51.218.112.236

The output appears right away because those four IPs were sitting in the queue-like list keyed by "ips" , waiting to be pulled out by our ipwatcher . Using .blpop() (or the BLPOP command) will block until an item is available in the list, then pops it off. It behaves like Python’s Queue.get() , which also blocks until an item is available.

Besides just spitting out IP addresses, our ipwatcher has a second job. For a given minute of an hour (minute 1 through minute 60), ipwatcher will classify an IP address as a hat-bot if it sends 15 or more GET requests in that minute.

Switch back to your first shell and mimic a page scraper that blasts the site with 20 requests in a few milliseconds:

for _ in range(20):
    r.lpush("ips", "104.174.118.18")

Finally, toggle back to the second shell holding ipwatcher , and you should see an output like this:

2019-03-11 15:15:43.041363:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.042027:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.042598:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.043143:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.043725:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.044244:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.044760:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.045288:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.045806:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.046318:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.046829:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.047392:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.047966:  saw 104.174.118.18
2019-03-11 15:15:43.048479:  saw 104.174.118.18
Hat bot detected!:  104.174.118.18
Hat bot detected!:  104.174.118.18
Hat bot detected!:  104.174.118.18
Hat bot detected!:  104.174.118.18
Hat bot detected!:  104.174.118.18
Hat bot detected!:  104.174.118.18

Now, Ctrl +C out of the while True loop and you’ll see that the offending IP has been added to your blacklist:

>>> blacklist
{IPv4Address('104.174.118.18')}

Can you find the defect in this detection system? The filter checks the minute as .minute rather than the last 60 seconds (a rolling minute). Implementing a rolling check to monitor how many times a user has been seen in the last 60 seconds would be trickier. There’s a crafty solution using using Redis’ sorted sets at ClassDojo. Josiah Carlson’s Redis in Action also presents a more elaborate and general-purpose example of this section using an IP-to-location cache table.

Persistence and Snapshotting

One of the reasons that Redis is so fast in both read and write operations is that the database is held in memory (RAM) on the server. However, a Redis database can also be stored (persisted) to disk in a process called snapshotting. The point behind this is to keep a physical backup in binary format so that data can be reconstructed and put back into memory when needed, such as at server startup.

You already enabled snapshotting without knowing it when you set up basic configuration at the beginning of this tutorial with the save alternativ:

# /etc/redis/6379.conf

port              6379
daemonize         yes
save              60 1
bind              127.0.0.1
tcp-keepalive     300
dbfilename        dump.rdb
dir               ./
rdbcompression    yes

The format is save . This tells Redis to save the database to disk if both the given number of seconds and number of write operations against the database occurred. In this case, we’re telling Redis to save the database to disk every 60 seconds if at least one modifying write operation occurred in that 60-second timespan. This is a fairly aggressive setting versus the sample Redis config file, which uses these three save directives:

# Default redis/redis.conf
save 900 1
save 300 10
save 60 10000

An RDB snapshot is a full (rather than incremental) point-in-time capture of the database. (RDB refers to a Redis Database File.) We also specified the directory and file name of the resulting data file that gets written:

# /etc/redis/6379.conf

port              6379
daemonize         yes
save              60 1
bind              127.0.0.1
tcp-keepalive     300
dbfilename        dump.rdb
dir               ./
rdbcompression    yes

This instructs Redis to save to a binary data file called dump.rdb in the current working directory of wherever redis-server was executed from:

$ file -b dump.rdb
data

You can also manually invoke a save with the Redis command BGSAVE :

127.0.0.1:6379> BGSAVE
Background saving started

The “BG” in BGSAVE indicates that the save occurs in the background. This option is available in a redis-py method as well:

>>> r.lastsave()  # Redis command: LASTSAVE
datetime.datetime(2019, 3, 10, 21, 56, 50)
>>> r.bgsave()
True
>>> r.lastsave()
datetime.datetime(2019, 3, 10, 22, 4, 2)

This example introduces another new command and method, .lastsave() . In Redis, it returns the Unix timestamp of the last DB save, which Python gives back to you as a datetime objekt. Above, you can see that the r.lastsave() result changes as a result of r.bgsave() .

r.lastsave() will also change if you enable automatic snapshotting with the save configuration option.

To rephrase all of this, there are two ways to enable snapshotting:

1. Explicitly, through the Redis command BGSAVE or redis-py method .bgsave()
2. Implicitly, through the save configuration option (which you can also set with .config_set() in redis-py )

RDB snapshotting is fast because the parent process uses the fork() system call to pass off the time-intensive write to disk to a child process, so that the parent process can continue on its way. This is what the background in BGSAVE refers to.

There’s also SAVE (.save() in redis-py ), but this does a synchronous (blocking) save rather than using fork() , so you shouldn’t use it without a specific reason.

Even though .bgsave() occurs in the background, it’s not without its costs. The time for fork() itself to occur can actually be substantial if the Redis database is large enough in the first place.

If this is a concern, or if you can’t afford to miss even a tiny slice of data lost due to the periodic nature of RDB snapshotting, then you should look into the append-only file (AOF) strategy that is an alternative to snapshotting. AOF copies Redis commands to disk in real time, allowing you to do a literal command-based reconstruction by replaying these commands.

Serialization Workarounds

Let’s get back to talking about Redis data structures. With its hash data structure, Redis in effect supports nesting one level deep:

127.0.0.1:6379> hset mykey field1 value1

The Python client equivalent would look like this:

r.hset("mykey", "field1", "value1")

Here, you can think of "field1":"value1" as being the key-value pair of a Python dict, {"field1":"value1"} , while mykey is the top-level key:

But what if you want the value of this dictionary (the Redis hash) to contain something other than a string, such as a list or nested dictionary with strings as values?

Here’s an example using some JSON-like data to make the distinction clearer:

restaurant_484272 = {
    "name": "Ravagh",
    "type": "Persian",
    "address": {
        "street": {
            "line1": "11 E 30th St",
            "line2": "APT 1",
        },
        "city": "New York",
        "state": "NY",
        "zip": 10016,
    }
}

Say that we want to set a Redis hash with the key 484272 and field-value pairs corresponding to the key-value pairs from restaurant_484272 . Redis does not support this directly, because restaurant_484272 is nested:

>>> r.hmset(484272, restaurant_484272)
Traceback (most recent call last):
# ...
redis.exceptions.DataError: Invalid input of type: 'dict'.
Convert to a byte, string or number first.

You can in fact make this work with Redis. There are two different ways to mimic nested data in redis-py and Redis:

1. Serialize the values into a string with something like json.dumps()
2. Use a delimiter in the key strings to mimic nesting in the values

Let’s take a look at an example of each.

Option 1:Serialize the Values Into a String

You can use json.dumps() to serialize the dict into a JSON-formatted string:

>>> import json
>>> r.set(484272, json.dumps(restaurant_484272))
True

If you call .get() , the value you get back will be a bytes object, so don’t forget to deserialize it to get back the original object. json.dumps() and json.loads() are inverses of each other, for serializing and deserializing data, respectively:

>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(json.loads(r.get(484272)))
{'address': {'city': 'New York',
             'state': 'NY',
             'street': '11 E 30th St',
             'zip': 10016},
 'name': 'Ravagh',
 'type': 'Persian'}

This applies to any serialization protocol, with another common choice being yaml :

>>> import yaml  # python -m pip install PyYAML
>>> yaml.dump(restaurant_484272)
'address: {city: New York, state: NY, street: 11 E 30th St, zip: 10016}\nname: Ravagh\ntype: Persian\n'

No matter what serialization protocol you choose to go with, the concept is the same:you’re taking an object that is unique to Python and converting it to a bytestring that is recognized and exchangeable across multiple languages.

Option 2:Use a Delimiter in Key Strings

There’s a second option that involves mimicking “nestedness” by concatenating multiple levels of keys in a Python dict . This consists of flattening the nested dictionary through recursion, so that each key is a concatenated string of keys, and the values are the deepest-nested values from the original dictionary. Consider our dictionary object restaurant_484272 :

restaurant_484272 = {
    "name": "Ravagh",
    "type": "Persian",
    "address": {
        "street": {
            "line1": "11 E 30th St",
            "line2": "APT 1",
        },
        "city": "New York",
        "state": "NY",
        "zip": 10016,
    }
}

We want to get it into this form:

{
    "484272:name":                     "Ravagh",
    "484272:type":                     "Persian",
    "484272:address:street:line1":     "11 E 30th St",
    "484272:address:street:line2":     "APT 1",
    "484272:address:city":             "New York",
    "484272:address:state":            "NY",
    "484272:address:zip":              "10016",
}

That’s what setflat_skeys() below does, with the added feature that it does inplace .set() operations on the Redis instance itself rather than returning a copy of the input dictionary:

 1from collections.abc import MutableMapping
 2
 3def setflat_skeys(
 4    r: redis.Redis,
 5    obj: dict,
 6    prefix: str,
 7    delim: str = ":",
 8    *,
 9    _autopfix=""
10) -> None:
11    """Flatten `obj` and set resulting field-value pairs into `r`.
12
13    Calls `.set()` to write to Redis instance inplace and returns None.
14
15    `prefix` is an optional str that prefixes all keys.
16    `delim` is the delimiter that separates the joined, flattened keys.
17    `_autopfix` is used in recursive calls to created de-nested keys.
18
19    The deepest-nested keys must be str, bytes, float, or int.
20    Otherwise a TypeError is raised.
21    """
22    allowed_vtypes = (str, bytes, float, int)
23    for key, value in obj.items():
24        key = _autopfix + key
25        if isinstance(value, allowed_vtypes):
26            r.set(f"{prefix}{delim}{key}", value)
27        elif isinstance(value, MutableMapping):
28            setflat_skeys(
29                r, value, prefix, delim, _autopfix=f"{key}{delim}"
30            )
31        else:
32            raise TypeError(f"Unsupported value type: {type(value)}")

The function iterates over the key-value pairs of obj , first checking the type of the value (Line 25) to see if it looks like it should stop recursing further and set that key-value pair. Otherwise, if the value looks like a dict (Line 27), then it recurses into that mapping, adding the previously seen keys as a key prefix (Line 28).

Let’s see it at work:

>>> r.flushdb()  # Flush database: clear old entries
>>> setflat_skeys(r, restaurant_484272, 484272)

>>> for key in sorted(r.keys("484272*")):  # Filter to this pattern
...     print(f"{repr(key):35}{repr(r.get(key)):15}")
...
b'484272:address:city'             b'New York'
b'484272:address:state'            b'NY'
b'484272:address:street:line1'     b'11 E 30th St'
b'484272:address:street:line2'     b'APT 1'
b'484272:address:zip'              b'10016'
b'484272:name'                     b'Ravagh'
b'484272:type'                     b'Persian'

>>> r.get("484272:address:street:line1")
b'11 E 30th St'

The final loop above uses r.keys("484272*") , where "484272*" is interpreted as a pattern and matches all keys in the database that begin with "484272" .

Notice also how setflat_skeys() calls just .set() rather than .hset() , because we’re working with plain string:string field-value pairs, and the 484272 ID key is prepended to each field string.

Encryption

Another trick to help you sleep well at night is to add symmetric encryption before sending anything to a Redis server. Consider this as an add-on to the security that you should make sure is in place by setting proper values in your Redis configuration. The example below uses the cryptography package:

$ python -m pip install cryptography

To illustrate, pretend that you have some sensitive cardholder data (CD) that you never want to have sitting around in plaintext on any server, no matter what. Before caching it in Redis, you can serialize the data and then encrypt the serialized string using Fernet:

>>> import json
>>> from cryptography.fernet import Fernet

>>> cipher = Fernet(Fernet.generate_key())
>>> info = {
...     "cardnum": 2211849528391929,
...     "exp": [2020, 9],
...     "cv2": 842,
... }

>>> r.set(
...     "user:1000",
...     cipher.encrypt(json.dumps(info).encode("utf-8"))
... )

>>> r.get("user:1000")
b'gAAAAABcg8-LfQw9TeFZ1eXbi'  # ... [truncated]

>>> cipher.decrypt(r.get("user:1000"))
b'{"cardnum": 2211849528391929, "exp": [2020, 9], "cv2": 842}'

>>> json.loads(cipher.decrypt(r.get("user:1000")))
{'cardnum': 2211849528391929, 'exp': [2020, 9], 'cv2': 842}

Because info contains a value that is a list , you’ll need to serialize this into a string that’s acceptable by Redis. (You could use json , yaml , or any other serialization for this.) Next, you encrypt and decrypt that string using the cipher objekt. You need to deserialize the decrypted bytes using json.loads() so that you can get the result back into the type of your initial input, a dict .

Note :Fernet uses AES 128 encryption in CBC mode. See the cryptography docs for an example of using AES 256. Whatever you choose to do, use cryptography , not pycrypto (imported as Crypto ), which is no longer actively maintained.

If security is paramount, encrypting strings before they make their way across a network connection is never a bad idea.

Compression

One last quick optimization is compression. If bandwidth is a concern or you’re cost-conscious, you can implement a lossless compression and decompression scheme when you send and receive data from Redis. Here’s an example using the bzip2 compression algorithm, which in this extreme case cuts down on the number of bytes sent across the connection by a factor of over 2,000:

 1>>> import bz2
 2
 3>>> blob = "i have a lot to talk about" * 10000
 4>>> len(blob.encode("utf-8"))
 5260000
 6
 7>>> # Set the compressed string as value
 8>>> r.set("msg:500", bz2.compress(blob.encode("utf-8")))
 9>>> r.get("msg:500")
10b'BZh91AY&SY\xdaM\x1eu\x01\x11o\x91\x80@\x002l\x87\'  # ... [truncated]
11>>> len(r.get("msg:500"))
12122
13>>> 260_000 / 122  # Magnitude of savings
142131.1475409836066
15
16>>> # Get and decompress the value, then confirm it's equal to the original
17>>> rblob = bz2.decompress(r.get("msg:500")).decode("utf-8")
18>>> rblob == blob
19True

The way that serialization, encryption, and compression are related here is that they all occur client-side. You do some operation on the original object on the client-side that ends up making more efficient use of Redis once you send the string over to the server. The inverse operation then happens again on the client side when you request whatever it was that you sent to the server in the first place.

Using Hiredis

It’s common for a client library such as redis-py to follow a protocol in how it is built. In this case, redis-py implements the REdis Serialization Protocol, or RESP.

Part of fulfilling this protocol consists of converting some Python object in a raw bytestring, sending it to the Redis server, and parsing the response back into an intelligible Python object.

For example, the string response “OK” would come back as "+OK\r\n" , while the integer response 1000 would come back as ":1000\r\n" . This can get more complex with other data types such as RESP arrays.

A parser is a tool in the request-response cycle that interprets this raw response and crafts it into something recognizable to the client. redis-py ships with its own parser class, PythonParser , which does the parsing in pure Python. (See .read_response() if you’re curious.)

However, there’s also a C library, Hiredis, that contains a fast parser that can offer significant speedups for some Redis commands such as LRANGE . You can think of Hiredis as an optional accelerator that it doesn’t hurt to have around in niche cases.

All that you have to do to enable redis-py to use the Hiredis parser is to install its Python bindings in the same environment as redis-py :

$ python -m pip install hiredis

What you’re actually installing here is hiredis-py , which is a Python wrapper for a portion of the hiredis C library.

The nice thing is that you don’t really need to call hiredis yourself. Just pip install it, and this will let redis-py see that it’s available and use its HiredisParser instead of PythonParser .

Internally, redis-py will attempt to import hiredis , and use a HiredisParser class to match it, but will fall back to its PythonParser instead, which may be slower in some cases:

# redis/utils.py
try:
    import hiredis
    HIREDIS_AVAILABLE = True
except ImportError:
    HIREDIS_AVAILABLE = False


# redis/connection.py
if HIREDIS_AVAILABLE:
    DefaultParser = HiredisParser
else:
    DefaultParser = PythonParser

Using Enterprise Redis Applications

While Redis itself is open-source and free, several managed services have sprung up that offer a data store with Redis as the core and some additional features built on top of the open-source Redis server:

• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis : This is a web service that lets you host a Redis server in the cloud, which you can connect to from an Amazon EC2 instance. For full setup instructions, you can walk through Amazon’s ElastiCache for Redis launch page.

• Microsoft’s Azure Cache for Redis : This is another capable enterprise-grade service that lets you set up a customizable, secure Redis instance in the cloud.

The designs of the two have some commonalities. You typically specify a custom name for your cache, which is embedded as part of a DNS name, such as demo.abcdef.xz.0009.use1.cache.amazonaws.com (AWS) or demo.redis.cache.windows.net (Azure).

Once you’re set up, here are a few quick tips on how to connect.

From the command line, it’s largely the same as in our earlier examples, but you’ll need to specify a host with the h flag rather than using the default localhost. For Amazon AWS , execute the following from your instance shell:

$ export REDIS_ENDPOINT="demo.abcdef.xz.0009.use1.cache.amazonaws.com"
$ redis-cli -h $REDIS_ENDPOINT

For Microsoft Azure , you can use a similar call. Azure Cache for Redis uses SSL (port 6380) by default rather than port 6379, allowing for encrypted communication to and from Redis, which can’t be said of TCP. All that you’ll need to supply in addition is a non-default port and access key:

$ export REDIS_ENDPOINT="demo.redis.cache.windows.net"
$ redis-cli -h $REDIS_ENDPOINT -p 6380 -a <primary-access-key>

The -h flag specifies a host, which as you’ve seen is 127.0.0.1 (localhost) by default.

When you’re using redis-py in Python, it’s always a good idea to keep sensitive variables out of Python scripts themselves, and to be careful about what read and write permissions you afford those files. The Python version would look like this:

>>> import os
>>> import redis

>>> # Specify a DNS endpoint instead of the default localhost
>>> os.environ["REDIS_ENDPOINT"]
'demo.abcdef.xz.0009.use1.cache.amazonaws.com'
>>> r = redis.Redis(host=os.environ["REDIS_ENDPOINT"])

Det är allt som finns. Besides specifying a different host , you can now call command-related methods such as r.get() as normal.

Note :If you want to use solely the combination of redis-py and an AWS or Azure Redis instance, then you don’t really need to install and make Redis itself locally on your machine, since you don’t need either redis-cli or redis-server .

If you’re deploying a medium- to large-scale production application where Redis plays a key role, then going with AWS or Azure’s service solutions can be a scalable, cost-effective, and security-conscious way to operate.

Wrapping Up

That concludes our whirlwind tour of accessing Redis through Python, including installing and using the Redis REPL connected to a Redis server and using redis-py in real-life examples. Here’s some of what you learned:

• redis-py lets you do (almost) everything that you can do with the Redis CLI through an intuitive Python API.
• Mastering topics such as persistence, serialization, encryption, and compression lets you use Redis to its full potential.
• Redis transactions and pipelines are essential parts of the library in more complex situations.
• Enterprise-level Redis services can help you smoothly use Redis in production.

Redis has an extensive set of features, some of which we didn’t really get to cover here, including server-side Lua scripting, sharding, and master-slave replication. If you think that Redis is up your alley, then make sure to follow developments as it implements an updated protocol, RESP3.

Further Reading

Here are some resources that you can check out to learn more.

Books:

• Josiah Carlson: Redis in Action
• Karl Seguin: The Little Redis Book
• Luc Perkins et. al.: Seven Databases in Seven Weeks

Redis in use:

• Twitter: Real-Time Delivery Architecture at Twitter
• Spool: Redis bitmaps – Fast, easy, realtime metrics
• 3scale: Having fun with Redis Replication between Amazon and Rackspace
• Instagram: Storing hundreds of millions of simple key-value pairs in Redis
• Craigslist: Redis Sharding at Craigslist
• Disqus: Redis at Disqus

Other:

• Digital Ocean: How To Secure Your Redis Installation
• AWS: ElastiCache for Redis User Guide
• Microsoft: Azure Cache for Redis
• Cheatography: Redis Cheat Sheet
• ClassDojo: Better Rate Limiting With Redis Sorted Sets
• antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo): Redis persistence demystified
• Martin Kleppmann: How to do distributed locking
• HighScalability: 11 Common Web Use Cases Solved in Redis