Book Image

Redis Essentials

Book Image

Redis Essentials

Overview of this book

Redis is the most popular in-memory key-value data store. It's very lightweight and its data types give it an edge over the other competitors. If you need an in-memory database or a high-performance cache system that is simple to use and highly scalable, Redis is what you need. Redis Essentials is a fast-paced guide that teaches the fundamentals on data types, explains how to manage data through commands, and shares experiences from big players in the industry. We start off by explaining the basics of Redis followed by the various data types such as Strings, hashes, lists, and more. Next, Common pitfalls for various scenarios are described, followed by solutions to ensure you do not fall into common traps. After this, major differences between client implementations in PHP, Python, and Ruby are presented. Next, you will learn how to extend Redis with Lua, get to know security techniques such as basic authorization, firewall rules, and SSL encryption, and discover how to use Twemproxy, Redis Sentinel, and Redis Cluster to scale infrastructures horizontally. At the end of this book, you will be able to utilize all the essential features of Redis to optimize your project's performance.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Redis Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
5
Clients for Your Favorite Language (Become a Redis Polyglot)
Index

The basic security


When Redis was designed, the main goals were maximum performance and simplicity, rather than maximum security. Although Redis implements a basic security mechanism, which is based on plain-text passwords, Redis does not implement Access Control List (ACL). Therefore, it is not possible to have users with different permission levels.

The authentication feature can be enabled through the configuration requirepass. Since Redis is superfast, requirepass could be dangerous as a malicious user could potentially guess thousands of passwords in a second. Avoid this by choosing a complex password of at least 64 characters.

After it is enabled, Redis will reject any commands from unauthenticated clients.

Copy the default redis.conf file to the chapter 7 folder, which is in the Redis source code directory. Every time the Redis configuration file is changed, the redis-server needs to be restarted; otherwise, the changes will not be applied.

Add the following to redis.conf:

requirepass...