redux

redux provides an interface to Redis. Two interfaces are provided; a low level interface (allowing execution of arbitrary Redis commands with almost no interface) and a high-level interface with an API that matches all of the several hundred Redis commands.

As well as supporting Redis commands, redux supports:

  • pipelineing: execute more than one command in a single Redis roundtrip, which can greatly increase performance, especially over high-latency connections.
  • socket connections: can connect to a locally running Redis instance over a unix socket (if Redis is configured to do so) for faster communication.
  • flexible serialisation: serialise any part of a Redis command, including keys and fields. Binary serialisation is supported via object_to_bin / bin_to_object, which are thin wrappers around serialize / unserialize
  • subscriptions: create a simple blocking subscribe client, applying a callback function to every message received.
  • error handling: Every Redis error becomes an R error.

redux also provides a driver for storr, allowing easy exchange of R objects between computers.

Usage

Create a hiredis object:

r <- redux::hiredis()

The hiredis object is a hiredis object with many (many methods), each corresponding to a different Redis command.

r
## <redis_api>
##   Redis commands:
##     APPEND: function
##     AUTH: function
##     BGREWRITEAOF: function
##     BGSAVE: function
##     ...
##     ZSCORE: function
##     ZUNIONSTORE: function
##   Other public methods:
##     clone: function
##     command: function
##     config: function
##     initialize: function
##     pipeline: function
##     reconnect: function
##     subscribe: function
##     type: function

All the methods are available from this object; for example to set “foo” to “bar”, use:

r$SET("foo", "bar")

See the package vignette for more information (vignette("redux")) or https://richfitz.github.io/redux/articles/redux.html

Testing

To use the test suite, please set the environment variables

  • NOT_CRAN=true
  • REDUX_TEST_USE_REDIS=true
  • REDUX_TEST_ISOLATED=true

The first two opt in to using redis at all, and the third activates commands that may be destructive or undesirable to use on a production server.

Installation

Install from CRAN with

or install the development version with

remotes::install_github("richfitz/redux", upgrade = FALSE)

See also

There is considerable prior work in this space:

  • rredis, the original R Redis client
  • RcppRedis, Dirk Eddelbuettel’s R Redis client, which greatly influenced the design decisions here
  • hiredis-rb, the Ruby Redis client that inspired the subscribe and pipeline support here.
  • rrlite, an almost identical interface to rlite, a serverless-zero configuration database with an identical interface to Redis

License

GPL-2 © Rich FitzJohn.