How to install Redis

The quickest way to install Redis on macOS is Homebrew, with brew install redis. On Ubuntu Linux you use apt-get install redis-server. Let’s see both in detail.

You can also download the source from https://redis.io/download and compile it, but the package managers do the work for you.

Redis can be installed on any server. In this case we’ll install it locally for testing.

How do you install Redis on macOS?

On macOS, run:

brew install redis

Then run

brew services start redis

to make Redis start automatically, and re-start when the computer reboots.

You can also start it manually using:

redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf

That’s the configuration file location on Intel Macs. On Apple Silicon, Homebrew installs everything under /opt/homebrew, so the file is at /opt/homebrew/etc/redis.conf instead.

How do you install Redis on Linux?

On Linux Ubuntu you’ll need to run

sudo apt-get install redis-server

and Redis will automatically be up and running.

You can check its status with:

sudo systemctl status redis-server

How do you verify it works?

Once it’s started, Redis listens on port 6379.

The fastest check is redis-cli, the command line client that ships with Redis:

redis-cli ping

If the server is running, it answers:

PONG

If you get Could not connect to Redis at 127.0.0.1:6379: Connection refused instead, the server is not running. On macOS, run brew services start redis again. On Ubuntu, run sudo systemctl start redis-server.

From redis-cli you can also open an interactive session and try commands like SET and GET right away.

One thing to watch out for

On a local server it’s fine to keep Redis running without a password. But when Redis is exposed to the Internet, make sure you configure a password.

Open the redis.conf configuration file (the location depends on your Operating System, see above) and set the requirepass directive:

requirepass your-long-secret-password

Also check the bind directive. By default Redis only listens on 127.0.0.1, the local machine. Keep it that way unless you have a good reason not to. An unprotected Redis instance open to the world gets found and abused fast.