How to Set Up a Redis Server as a Session Handler for PHP on Ubuntu 14.04

Can I firstly say, great how-to!

Secondly, more of a comment on the PPA. Did you know ubuntu-14.04 has redis-server bundled and can support everything you do in the tutorial with sudo apt-get install redis-server from vanilla 14.04?

I know it’s probably not the latest stable, but sometimes distro-maintained is a good thing. Unless there is a CVE the new stable release fixes, and most of the time distro-maintained will backport security patches.

Anyway, my comment is largely irrelevant, I just wondered if you knew, and wanted to say well done on the tutorial.

Does anyone have experience or data as to how this performs vs memcached or standard session handling?

…Will this create any conflict if i have Memcached installed?

Great how to! Easy to follow for a novice. Would love to see a how to for getting a php page to make redis set/get calls! I am not having much luck following what’s out on the web.

Thanks, Jason

So in a server environment with a web server and a database server, where would you advise Redis to be installed for best performance?

Also in this tutorial is redis performing object-caching?

Thanks, JL

FYI:

I had used apg to generate a 72 character-long password for my Redis Server and found that tcp:// requests were failing. The password string contained several non-alphanumeric (ie special) characters.

Solved by:

Encode the string before sending to a port. I had success with:

• php: urlencode() - longer
• -and-
• js: encodeURIComponent() - shorter

If you are using PHP 7.0 FPM, whether you are using Nginx or Apache, if you realise the instructions above doesn’t work for you, and redis-cli doesn’t show your saved session.

you should go to the following file

 /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/redis.ini

and add the following lines

session.save_handler = redis
session.save_path = "tcp://127.0.0.1:6379?auth=supercomplexpasswordthatyousetbefore"

save and exit, and restart php fpm

sudo service php7.0-fpm restart

Your session should now show when you type keys *

I’m using Ubuntu 16.04

Hi,

Can anyone help me with the setup of multi master node redis setup?

How do you handle cleaning up expired sessions using this method? Will allkeys-lru maxmemory-policy work, or does an explicit expiration need to be set?

@erikaheidi Hey Erika! Thanks for this much!

I am trying to setup redis in an environment, where I need wordpress to connect securely to a VPS (Digital Ocean droplet) hosting a redis server.

I have managed this:

Webserver - > SSH RSA PK AUTH - > Redis VPS

Now I need this:

Authenticated Web Server - > Redis Instance - > Object Cache - > Session Handling - > DB store

Is that doable?

All default TCP connections are blocked on the droplet Only SSH via RSA is allowed on the droplet