Setting up Redis on macOS Sierra

From zero to Redis on fresh mac

Happy days are here! I got a brand spanking new development laptop. I replaced my 2013 Retina MacBook Pro, and, despite mixed reviews, I went to a MacBook Pro 15" with the touch bar. The novelty of the touch bar hasn’t worn of yet and, honestly, I don’t miss the function keys yet. My reason for upgrading is that my old MacBook has always been a touch flakey (even after a logic board replacement) but the random reboots and kernel panics have started to increase. I’m running more VMs these days too and the extra ram (from 8gb→16gb) is welcome.

The joy of a new machine is always tempered by the pain of getting your development environment back just right. I’ve installed Redis on quite a few machines and servers and it’s been a set it and forget it affair.

I still want that convenience, but I also want a little more flexibility. Most of the instructions/scripts floating around the web install Redis on a Mac as root. I really don’t want that — I want Redis to run as a user so if I’m logged in under a different account, it doesn’t run. Redis also doesn’t really need to be root in a development situation. Finally, the less I have to type sudo the better.

Since I’m doing some development on Redis modules, it’s also possible that I will have multiple Redis server instances running at one time. It makes sense to have a more logical and contained pattern to my directories rather than spreading everything around the file system. So, here are my steps to install Redis on a fresh macOS system.

• Download Redis. I’m installing 4.0 RC2 in this case. I followed the instructions on this page, up to the untaring bit.
• Before you make. It’s wise to enable DevToolsSecurity, if you don’t then you’ll be greeted with dozens of dialog boxes to enter your password or use your finger print. You can see how to enable it on stackoverflow.
• In the terminal $ make
• Then $ make test Hopefully everything works and you get the victorious \o/
• Next up, let’s create the plist file for Redis
  $ nano ~/Library/LaunchAgents/io.redis.redis-server.plist
Set the value to this (replacing with your own directory)

• Make a directory to hold your Redis related stuff. We’ll do it off your home directory ($ mkdir ~/redis). This way, we centralize a few things and making swapping out new versions in the future a breeze.
• Now, let’s use symbolic links for a couple of important executables. At a later point, you can change these to a new version while retaining the old version for testing or what not.

$ ln -s /Users/YOURUSERDIRECTORY/redis-4.0-rc2/src/redis-server /Users/YOURUSERDIRECTORY/redis/redis-server
$ ln -s /Users/YOURUSERDIRECTORY/redis-4.0-rc2/src/redis-cli /Users/YOURUSERDIRECTORY/redis/redis-cli

• I want to retain the redis.conf as an actual file. This way I can keep the settings the same when I change versions later (although be aware that future versions may have new things in the conf file). Let’s copy the stock conf file from the install into our newly created ~/redis directory.

$ cp /Users/YOURUSERDIRECTORY/redis-4.0-rc2/redis.conf ./redis.conf

• In the redis.conf, I made a few changes. First, set the directory of the dump.rdb file to our newly created ~/redis directory.

dir ./Users/YOURUSERDIRECTORY/redis/

• Next, I set a password (which really shouldn’t be optional). It’s the requirepass line in the conf.
• Now that you’re redis.conf is minimally setup, load in the new plist file and start the server.

$ launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/io.redis.redis-server.plist
$ launchctl start io.redis.redis-server

• To be able to access your executables from any directory, let’s add it to path. To do this, you need to edit a file:

$ nano ~/.bash_profile

• In the file (which might be empty), add the line:

export PATH=$PATH:/Users/YOURUSERDIRECTORY/redis

• After saving the file, you can put it into action for the first time by doing:

$ . $HOME/.bash_profile

There you have it — setup instructions for Redis that are only for a single user. I wrote this for my future self as much as for anyone else, so I hope you find it useful (Kyle-in-the-future and others)!