Introduction of Redis

• Building Redis from Source Code
• Running Redis
• Using GDB to Debug the Source Code

There are a lot of articles about Redis. You can get more information about Redis from its offical website. I just read the redis source code base on the release 7.0 and here I will note the part that I am interested in.

Building Redis from Source Code

My computer environment is list belowed:

1. OS: Linux mint 20.2
2. CPU: Intel x86_64 cpu

If your environment is similiar with mine, you should get no problem as I get. If you have any issues, you can go to this reids github issue to get some help.

After you have download the source code of Redis from github, you can do the following steps to build Redis:

1. Enter the root directory of Redis project, then run the make command.
2. After executing the make command, run the make test command to test it running.

If everything is fine, Redis is successfully built.

Running Redis

To run Redis with the default configuration, just type:

% cd src
% ./redis-server

If you want to provide your redis.conf, you have to run it using an additional parameter (the path of the configuration file):

% cd src
% ./redis-server /path/to/redis.conf

It is possible to alter the Redis configuration by passing parameters directly as options using the command line. Examples:

% ./redis-server --port 9999 --replicaof 127.0.0.1 6379
% ./redis-server /etc/redis/6379.conf --loglevel debug

All the options in redis.conf are also supported as options using the command line, with exactly the same name.

Then you can run Redis client with the command:

cd src
./redis-cli

Using GDB to Debug the Source Code

This is the official reference article of Redis debugging.

By default Redis is compiled with the -O2 switch, this means that compiler optimizations are enabled. It is better to attach GDB to Redis compiled without optimizations using the make noopt command to compile it (instead of just using the plain make command).

Then start the redis-server process. Using the command redis-cli info | grep process_id to get the processid of the redis-server. Then, for example, run the gdb with the path to the redis-server and the processid as gdb attach 58414. If it doesn’t work, follow the prompt of the gdb and try again as the root user. It should work finally.