Guard::Redis

Redis guard manages your development Redis server, and will automatically restart if necessary.

The code for this gem was taken from this blog post by Avdi Grimm. It refers to this Gist, and I searched around for an existing repo quite a bit before packing it up here. All credit goes to Avdi for the source and all fault goes to me for configuration or packaging issues.

Install

Make sure you have Guard installed before continuing.

Install the gem:

$ gem install guard-redis

Add it to your Gemfile. You should really only need it in development and test environments; this gem is not meant to manage production server instances of Redis.

gem 'guard-redis'

Add the guard definition to your Guardfile by running:

$ guard init redis

Options

The main purpose of Guard::Redis is to ensure that redis-server is running while you're coding and testing. It can optionally monitor a set of files and reload the process (useful if you're frequently changing code that affects the configuration of Redis).

It takes several options related to its configuration.

List of available options

:executable => "/path/to/redis-server/executable"  # Set the custom path to the Redis server executable
:port => 9999                                      # Set a custom port number the Redis server is running on
:pidfile => "/var/pid/redis.pid"                   # Set a custom path the where the pidfile is written
:reload_on_change => false                         # Reload Redis if any of the specified files change. Note that you
                                                   # must specify this option in addition to passing a block to Guard.
:capture_logging => true                           # Enables logging to :logfile
:logfile => "log/redis_#{port}.log"                # Set a custom path where logs from Redis are written
                                                   # Since by default the output from Redis goes to the ether, these options
                                                   # let you redirect logging to a file to assist with debugging crashes
:shutdown_retries => 3                             # Set a number of times to retry
:shutdown_wait => 5                                # Set a number of seconds to wait between retries
                                                   # Sometimes Redis takes more than a moment to shut down and you can use
                                                   # these options to ensure it does so cleanly before reloading with :reload_on_change.

Pidfile location must be writable

Starting with version 2.0.0, the pidfile location you specify or the default location (/tmp/redis.pid) if you don't specify must be writable or guard-redis will fail to start.

If you specify a pidfile location via the configuration and the directory path doesn't exist, guard-redis will attempt to create it. If it cannot write to that directory, you will see an error and redis will fail to start.

Contributors

Thanks so much to all who have contributed!