Install and Configure Redis on Ubuntu 16.04

5 min readDec 14, 2018

In this post, I ‘ll explain Redis installation on Ubuntu Server and minor customization for connection and control. I hope this document useful for someone.

Install the Build and Test Dependencies

We can update our local apt package cache and install the dependencies by typing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential tcl

Download, Compile, and Install Redis

Download and Extract the Source Code

Since we won’t need to keep the source code that we’ll compile long term (we can always re-download it), we will build in the /tmp directory. Let's move there now:

cd /tmp

Now, download the latest stable version of Redis. This is always available at a stable download URL:

curl -O http://download.redis.io/redis-stable.tar.gz

Unpack the tarball by typing:

tar xzvf redis-stable.tar.gz

Move into the Redis source directory structure that was just extracted:

cd redis-stable

Build and Install Redis

Since we won’t need to keep the source code that we’ll compile long term (we can always re-download it), we will build in the /tmp directory. Let's move there now:

cd /tmp

Now, download the latest stable version of Redis. This is always available at a stable download URL :

curl -O http://download.redis.io/redis-stable.tar.gz

Unpack the tarball by typing:

tar xzvf redis-stable.tar.gz

Move into the Redis source directory structure that was just extracted:

cd redis-stable

Build and Install Redis

Now, we can compile the Redis binaries by typing:

make

After the binaries are compiled, run the test suite to make sure everything was built correctly. You can do this by typing:

make test

This will typically take a few minutes to run. Once it is complete, you can install the binaries onto the system by typing:

sudo make install

Configure Redis

To start off, we need to create a configuration directory. We will use the conventional /etc/redis directory, which can be created by typing:

sudo mkdir /etc/redis

Now, copy over the sample Redis configuration file included in the Redis source archive:

sudo cp /tmp/redis-stable/redis.conf /etc/redis

Next, we can open the file to adjust a few items in the configuration:

sudo nano /etc/redis/redis.conf

In the file, find the supervised directive. Currently, this is set to no. Since we are running an operating system that uses the systemd init system, we can change this to systemd:

Next, find the /dir directory. This option specifies the directory that Redis will use to dump persistent data. We need to pick a location that Redis will have write permission and that isn't viewable by normal users.

We will use the /var/lib/redis directory for this, which we will create in a moment:

Create a Redis systemd Unit File

Create and open the /etc/systemd/system/redis.service file to get started:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/redis.service

Inside, we can begin the [Unit] section by adding a description and defining a requirement that networking be available before starting this service:

In the [Service] section, we need to specify the service’s behavior. For security purposes, we should not run our service as root. We should use a dedicated user and group, which we will call redis for simplicity. We will create these momentarily.

To start the service, we just need to call the redis-server binary, pointed at our configuration. To stop it, we can use the Redisshutdown command, which can be executed with the redis-cli binary. Also, since we want Redis to recover from failures when possible, we will set the Restart directive to “always”: