Install just redis-cli on Ubuntu, Debian, Jessie

As part of adding integration tests to an app on CircleCI I ran into the following issues:

• redis-cli’s API has changed from Redis CLI versions 2 to 3 to 4
  • ie. this works in v4 redis-cli -u ${REDIS_URL} but doesn’t in v2
• the “only way” to install redis-cli is through a redis-tools or redis-server install and I only need the Redis CLI not the server or any other tools.

What follows is how not to install redis-cli and then how to install redis-cli latest, properly.

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Bad: install outdated Redis CLI version

apt-get install redis-tools

This installs an outdated version, 2.8.x where stable is 4.x.x.

Better: install latest Redis CLI as part of redis-server

apt-get install redis-server

Maybe we don’t need the full redis-server install if we only need the Redis CLI. Sometimes it also installs the old redis-cli… not the best.

Best: install just Redis CLI with redis-cli binary from tarball

cd /tmp
wget http://download.redis.io/redis-stable.tar.gz
tar xvzf redis-stable.tar.gz
cd redis-stable
make
cp src/redis-cli /usr/local/bin/
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/redis-cli

You’ll need libjemalloc1 libjemalloc-dev gcc make most of which should already be installed. We’re building from source… which takes about a minute on the CircleCI containers (so I would expect less everywhere else), which is fine.

Credit: DevOps Zone, install redis-cli without installing server. I shamelessly took the snippet from there, because hey, it works.

Installing redis-cli latest on CircleCI

Same as above except:

sudo cp src/redis-cli /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/redis-cli

CircleCI runs the jobs with a non-root user by default, and kudos to them for that, more tools should make you think about what privileges you have.

It does however mean that we need an extra command for the Redis CLI to be runnable.

Installing redis-cli latest on Alpine in Docker

apk --upgrade redis

apk seems to keep a more recent version of Redis CLI in its repositories.

Nils Stahl