In this part, we will try to run a redis standalone instance on your local machine. Typically you can install Redis using its official tar.gz releases. You can download it from its official site or follow the instructions in this blog post to run it on Windows. I will be using Docker images from redis for this post.

If you are not sure what Docker is, you should read this article.

Why use docker?

  • The simpler reason is because I don’t want to install any dependencies on my system.
  • Docker also gives a completely reproducible environment, which mean whatever you read here, you will be able to reproduce exactly.

Pre requisites

  • A windows or a linux system with internet.
  • Docker Engine. (You can find installation instructions on the official site)

I am on a Windows machine so I will be using Powershell for most of my work. But the same commands should work fine on Linux systems as well.

Steps

Validate docker

Open a Powershell window and run

docker -v

For me this prints Docker version 20.10.5, build 55c4c88 At this point if you get an error saying

error during connect: This error may indicate that the docker daemon is not running.: Get http://%2F%2F.%2Fpipe%2Fdocker_engine/v1.24/containers/json: open //./pipe/docker_engine: The system cannot find the file specified.

it means your docker service is running. Start that first.

Get the Redis image

Next we need to pull the redis image from the public docker registry.

docker pull redis

This will pull the latest redis image from the docker public registry. If everything is fine, you should see multiple lines of logs with a progress bar next to each line. Let the download complete.

Validate image

Once the download completes check if the image is available on your system.

docker images

This should should a list of images present in your system. You should see an entry for redis.

Run an instance

As a quick check, start a new instance of the redis image and check if it is working as expected.

docker run --rm --name test-redis-instance redis

This should print a long alphanumeric hash on your console. That is your container id. Breakdown of the command

Command Meaning
docker base command
run starts a container
--rm Removes the container automatically when it is stopped
--name Specifies the name of the container. If unspecified a random name is given.
test-redis-instance Name of our container
redis Name of the image to use

Run docker ps to see the running containers. You should see an entry for test-redis-instance.

We now have redis running on our system. In the next part we will see how we can execute commands against this redis instance to get keys and set values.