Why You Should Use Valkey Instead of Redis

What Happened to Redis?#

Redis for a long time was provided under the BSD License, which basically meant people could do whatever they wanted as long as they kept the License copy and attributions. Several other licensing changes happened over the year, but the big one was in 2024, where they relicensed 7.4 with RSAL and SSPL.

This left people hesitant to continue using Redis because people who write proprietary code probably would find it cumbersome to have to rewrite code in a way that isn’t proprietary because the license forces people to contribute back to the project.

It also restricts commercial use entirely, which meant that big companies were most likely not going to be contributing back at all anymore, and perhaps moving to better solutions.

Dismissing Redis to Simplify the Stack#

A good number of projects also realized that using Redis wasn’t really necessary for their needs. As PostgreSQL improves in performance over the years, people started to even use it as a Time Series Database.

Rise of Valkey#

Valkey rose after the introduction of the new licenses, and it was created in a way to be very simple to migrate from an existing instance… unless you were someone like me who didn’t bother doing it until redis 8.

Here’s a list of projects that I now have moved over to using valkey (even if they do not support it explicitly)

https://github.com/LogicLabs-OU/OpenArchiver

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Make sure to use REDIS_PASSWORD to set the password.

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

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Use REDIS_DBINDEX to set the db_num of your instance.

https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

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Set REDIS_URL without the db_num
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Then set
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RAILS_CACHE_DB
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RAILS_JOB_QUEUE_DB
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RAILS_WS_DB
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to the db num you want to use.

https://github.com/nextcloud/server

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In your php config, it'll look something like this
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$CONFIG = array (
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  'memcache.local' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\APCu',
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  'memcache.distributed' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\Redis',
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  'memcache.locking' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\Redis',
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  'redis' =>
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  array (
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    'host' => 'valkey',
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    'port' => 6379,
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    'password' => 'password',
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    'dbindex' => 5,
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  ),
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...

https://github.com/outline/outline

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Set REDIS_URL to redis://:password@valkey:6379/{db_num}