Installing Redis

• 1: Install Redis on Linux
• 2: Install Redis on macOS
• 3: Install Redis on Windows
• 4: Install Redis from Source

1 - Install Redis on Linux

Most major Linux distributions provide packages for Redis.

Install on Ubuntu

You can install recent stable versions of Redis from the official packages.redis.io APT repository. Add the repository to the apt index, update it, and then install:

curl -fsSL https://packages.redis.io/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/redis-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/redis-archive-keyring.gpg] https://packages.redis.io/deb $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/redis.list

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install redis

Install from Snapcraft

The Snapcraft store provides Redis installation packages for dozens of Linux distributions. For example, here's how to install Redis on CentOS using Snapcraft:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install snapd
sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.socket
sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/snap /snap
sudo snap install redis

2 - Install Redis on macOS

This guide shows you how to install Redis on macOS using Homebrew. Homebrew is the easiest way to install Redis on macOS. If you'd prefer to build Redis from the source files on macOS, see [Installing Redis from Source].

Prerequisites

First, make sure you have Homebrew installed. From the terminal, run:

$ brew --version

If this command fails, you'll need to follow the Homebrew installation instructions.

Installation

From the terminal, run:

brew install redis

This will install Redis on your system.

Starting and stopping Redis in the foreground

To test your Redis installation, you can run the redis-server executable from the command line:

redis-server

If successful, you'll see the startup logs for Redis, and Redis will be running in the foreground.

To stop Redis, enter Ctrl-C.

Starting and stopping Redis using launchd

As an alternative to running Redis in the foreground, you can also use launchd to start the process in the background:

brew services start redis

This launch Redis and restart it at login. You can check the status of a launchd managed Redis by running the following:

brew services info redis

If the service is running, you'll see output like the following:

redis (homebrew.mxcl.redis)
Running: ✔
Loaded: ✔
User: miranda
PID: 67975

To stop the service, run:

brew services stop redis

Connect to Redis

Once Redis is running, you can test it by running redis-cli:

redis-cli

This will open the Redis REPL. Try running some commands:

127.0.0.1:6379> lpush demos redis-macOS-demo
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> rpop demos
"redis-macOS-demo"

Next steps

Once you have a running Redis instance, you may want to:

• Try the Redis CLI tutorial
• Connect using one of the Redis clients

3 - Install Redis on Windows

Redis is not officially supported on Windows. However, you can install install Redis on Windows for development by the following the instructions below.

To install Redis on Windows, you'll first need to enable WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). WSL2 lets you run Linux binaries natively on Windows. For this method to work, you'll need to be running Windows 10 version 2004 and higher or Windows 11.

Install or enable WSL2

Microsoft provides detailed instructions for installing WSL. Follow these instructions, and take note of the default Linux distribution it installs. This guide assumes Ubuntu.

Install Redis

Once you're running Ubuntu on Windows, you can install Redis using apt-get:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:redislabs/redis
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install redis-server

Then start the Redis server like so:

sudo service redis-server start

Connect to Redis

You can test that your Redis server is running by connecting with the Redis CLI:

redis-cli 
127.0.0.1:6379> ping
PONG

4 - Install Redis from Source

You can compile and install Redis from source on variety of platforms and operating systems including Linux and macOS. Redis has no dependencies other than a C compiler and libc.

Downloading the source files

The Redis source files are available on [this site's Download page]. You can verify the integrity of these downloads by checking them against the digests in the redis-hashes git repository.

To obtain the source files for the latest stable version of Redis from the Redis downloads site, run:

wget https://download.redis.io/redis-stable.tar.gz

Compiling Redis

To compile Redis, first the tarball, change to the root directory, and then run make:

tar -xzvf redis-stable.tar.gz
cd redis-stable
make

If the compile succeeds, you'll find several Redis binaries in the src directory, including:

• redis-server: the Redis Server itself
• redis-cli is the command line interface utility to talk with Redis.

To install these binaries in /usr/local/bin, run:

make install

Starting and stopping Redis in the foreground

Once installed, you can start Redis by running

redis-server

If successful, you'll see the startup logs for Redis, and Redis will be running in the foreground.

To stop Redis, enter Ctrl-C.