Swift Redis

Redis for Swift, Linux friendly!

Introduction

Much serious backend development, for better or for worse, tends to depend on Redis for distributed synchronization of data. Swift isn't a serious force for developers trying to do meaningful work on the server without bindings for systems such as Redis.

This package wraps the hiredis library, a solid and proven backbone to most Redis client libraries.

Getting Started

Installation

Add this repo to your Package.swift in your dependencies array like so:

.Package(url: “https://github.com/swizzlr/swift-redis.git”, majorVersion: 1)

You must have hiredis installed with development headers. On ubuntu/debian:

sudo apt-get install libhiredis-dev

On Mac OS X:

brew install hiredis

If developing on OS X, please see below for notes about module maps.

Usage

Note: I'm currently working on the higher level Redis abstraction with a Swift. However, a wrapper library for hiredis is available in 1.0 that gives you total power and flexibility. If you write any code to wrap hiredis, drop it in an issue!

Simply import hiredis and you're ready to go!

A simple example, straight from the integration test suite.

// Connect to a server, getting a context object which represents the connection and its state
let context = redisConnect(ip: "127.0.0.1", port: 6379)
let reply = redisCommand(context: context, command: "PING", args: 0).str // "PONG"

Structure

• CHiRedis is automatically installed, a separate module which maps a Linux installation of hiredis into Swift
• hiredis is a set of simple wrappers around CHiRedis that perform the documented type conversions and vararg wrappings from C. It's the extra conversions the Swift compiler can't manage
• Redis is the high level abstraction that your day to day Redis use will be in. Under development.

License

SwiftRedis is available under the BSD 3-clause license. If you have any suggestions for relicensing, I'm happy to hear it, as long as it isn't viral.

Getting Help

Please open an issue!

Contributing

This is your opportunity to influence the growth of a language that is taking the world by storm, and mature, useful libraries are a crucial part of it. Contributions very much welcome, encouraged and loved.

Developing on SwiftRedis

I recommend you use Docker. See below for more info.

Requirements

The above note about hiredis applies. brew install hiredis or sudo apt-get -y install libhiredis-dev.

Linux

Requires the 18 Dec Linux snapshot or later (for varargs support).

OS X

If you're using OS X, you'll need to manually edit the module.modulemap in the downloaded CHiRedis package of the Packages folder after running swift build for the first time to checkout the package. You need to supply the correct absolute path to the hiredis headers, which on OS X will almost certainly be in /usr/local/include if you used homebrew.

Building and running tests

Running swift build in the root of this directory will, by convention, do the right thing. The build products will be available in .build/debug.

Since a dedicated test command/runner is currently missing in swift build, the tests are structured as executables. Currently there only exists RedisIntegrationTests. This must be run with the following environment variables correctly set pointing to a running Redis instance:

REDIS_PORT_6379_TCP_ADDR
REDIS_PORT_6379_TCP_PORT

This will be handled for you automatically if you use Docker. See below.

Docker

Docker recommended. Integration tests rely on it, since they needing a running Redis instance, and extract the appropriate environment variables accordingly.

If you're on a Mac, you'll need to install the docker-toolbox. Open the docker-quickstart terminal to have a terminal with docker ready to go.

If you're feeling a little more advanced, you can use docker-machine to provision a VM in the cloud. You'll have the added benefit of much faster installs.

To get started, run ./script/test to build the complete package and run the tests in Docker.

Future work

Eventually I hope to remove the dependency on hiredis entirely, since Swift is quite suited to that sort of systems programming too. However, hiredis is a proven, solid backbone of many other implementations of Redis, and I have no qualms about standing on it for now while we get started.