Introduction to Redis

Redis is an open source, BSD licensed, 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.

You can run atomic operations on these types, like appending to a string; incrementing the value in a hash; pushing to a list; computing set intersection, union and difference; or getting the member with highest ranking in a sorted set.

In order to achieve its outstanding performance, Redis works with an in-memory dataset. Depending on your use case, you can persist it either by dumping the dataset to disk every once in a while, or by appending each command to a log.

Redis also supports trivial-to-setup master-slave replication, with very fast non-blocking first synchronization, auto-reconnection on net split and so forth.

Other features include Transactions, Pub/Sub, Lua scripting, Keys with a limited time-to-live, and configuration settings to make Redis behave like a cache.

You can use Redis from most programming languages out there.

Redis is written in ANSI C and works in most POSIX systems like Linux, *BSD, OS X without external dependencies. Linux and OSX are the two operating systems where Redis is developed and more tested, and we recommend using Linux for deploying. Redis may work in Solaris-derived systems like SmartOS, but the support is best effort. There is no official support for Windows builds, but Microsoft develops and maintains a Win32-64 experimental version of Redis.