Root SSH Access is required to proceed. You should contact your server provider on how to obtain the root ssh credentials. For cPanel users, check the SSH Access (root) section
Redis must be installed on your server. We use Redis for atomicity lock which prevents race condition and double spending.
The installation procedure are unique to every operating system, if it is not bundled by default with your server, you should contact your service provider for assistant.
In order to get the latest version of Redis, we will use apt
to install it from the official Ubuntu repositories.
Update your local apt
package cache and install Redis by typing:
sudo apt updatesudo apt install redis-server
This will download and install Redis and its dependencies. Following this, there is one important configuration change to make in the Redis configuration file, which was generated automatically during the installation.
Open this file with your preferred text editor:
sudo nano /etc/redis/redis.conf
Inside the file, find the supervised
directive. This directive allows you to declare an init system to manage Redis as a service, providing you with more control over its operation. The supervised
directive is set to no
by default. Since you are running Ubuntu, which uses the systemd init system, change this to systemd
:/etc/redis/redis.conf
. . .# If you run Redis from upstart or systemd, Redis can interact with your# supervision tree. Options:# supervised no - no supervision interaction# supervised upstart - signal upstart by putting Redis into SIGSTOP mode# supervised systemd - signal systemd by writing READY=1 to $NOTIFY_SOCKET# supervised auto - detect upstart or systemd method based on# UPSTART_JOB or NOTIFY_SOCKET environment variables# Note: these supervision methods only signal "process is ready."# They do not enable continuous liveness pings back to your supervisor.supervised systemd. . .
That’s the only change you need to make to the Redis configuration file at this point, so save and close it when you are finished. Then, restart the Redis service to reflect the changes you made to the configuration file:
sudo systemctl restart redis.service
With that, you’ve installed and configured Redis and it’s running on your machine. Before you begin using it, though, it’s prudent to first check whether Redis is functioning correctly.
By default, Redis is only accessible from localhost. However, if you installed and configured Redis by following a different tutorial than this one, you might have updated the configuration file to allow connections from anywhere. This is not as secure as binding to localhost.
To correct this, open the Redis configuration file for editing:
sudo nano /etc/redis/redis.conf
Locate this line and make sure it is uncommented (remove the #
if it exists):/etc/redis/redis.conf
bind 127.0.0.1 ::1
Save and close the file when finished (press CTRL + X
, Y
, then ENTER
).
Then, restart the service to ensure that systemd reads your changes:
sudo systemctl restart redis
To check that this change has gone into effect, run the following netstat
command:
sudo netstat -lnp | grep redis
Outputtcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:6379 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 14222/redis-servertcp6 0 0 ::1:6379 :::* LISTEN 14222/redis-server
This output shows that the redis-server
program is bound to localhost (127.0.0.1
), reflecting the change you just made to the configuration file. If you see another IP address in that column (0.0.0.0
, for example), then you should double check that you uncommented the correct line and restart the Redis service again.
Now that your Redis installation is only listening in on localhost, it will be more difficult for malicious actors to make requests or gain access to your server.
Configuring a Redis password enables one of its two built-in security features — the auth
command, which requires clients to authenticate to access the database. The password is configured directly in Redis’s configuration file, /etc/redis/redis.conf
, so open that file again with your preferred editor:
sudo nano /etc/redis/redis.conf
Scroll to the SECURITY
section and look for a commented directive that reads:/etc/redis/redis.conf
# requirepass foobared
Uncomment it by removing the #
, and change foobared
to a secure password.
Note: Above the requirepass
directive in the redis.conf
file, there is a commented warning:
# Warning: since Redis is pretty fast an outside user can try up to# 150k passwords per second against a good box. This means that you should# use a very strong password otherwise it will be very easy to break.#
Thus, it’s important that you specify a very strong and very long value as your password. Rather than make up a password yourself, you can use the openssl
command to generate a random one, as in the following example. By piping the output of the first command to the second openssl
command, as shown here, it will remove any line breaks produced by that the first command:
openssl rand 60 | openssl base64 -A
Your output should look something like:
OutputRBOJ9cCNoGCKhlEBwQLHri1g+atWgn4Xn4HwNUbtzoVxAYxkiYBi7aufl4MILv1nxBqR4L6NNzI0X6cE
After copying and pasting the output of that command as the new value for requirepass
, it should read:
/etc/redis/redis.confrequirepass RBOJ9cCNoGCKhlEBwQLHri1g+atWgn4Xn4HwNUbtzoVxAYxkiYBi7aufl4MILv1nxBqR4L6NNzI0X6cE
After setting the password, save and close the file, then restart Redis:
sudo systemctl restart redis.service
Before we can install Redis, we must first add Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository to the server’s package lists. EPEL is a package repository containing a number of open-source add-on software packages, most of which are maintained by the Fedora Project.
We can install EPEL using yum
sudo yum install epel-release
Once the EPEL installation has finished you can install Redis, again using yum
:
sudo yum install redis -y
This may take a few minutes to complete. After the installation finishes, start the Redis service:
sudo systemctl start redis.service
If you’d like Redis to start on boot, you can enable it with the enable
command:
sudo systemctl enable redis
You can check Redis’s status by running the following:
sudo systemctl status redis.service
Output● redis.service - Redis persistent key-value databaseLoaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/redis.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)Drop-In: /etc/systemd/system/redis.service.d└─limit.confActive: active (running) since Thu 2018-03-01 15:50:38 UTC; 7s agoMain PID: 3962 (redis-server)CGroup: /system.slice/redis.service└─3962 /usr/bin/redis-server 127.0.0.1:6379
An effective way to safeguard Redis is to secure the server it’s running on. You can do this by ensuring that Redis is bound only to localhost
To remedy this, open the Redis configuration file for editing:
sudo vi /etc/redis.conf
Locate the line beginning with bind
and make sure it’s uncommented:/etc/redis.conf
bind 127.0.0.1
Configuring a Redis password enables one of its built-in security features — the auth
command — which requires clients to authenticate before being allowed access to the database. Like the bind
setting, the password is configured directly in Redis’s configuration file, /etc/redis.conf
. Reopen that file:
sudo vi /etc/redis.conf
Scroll to the SECURITY
section and look for a commented directive that reads:/etc/redis.conf
# requirepass foobared
Uncomment it by removing the #
, and change foobared
to a very strong password of your choosing. Rather than make up a password yourself, you may use a tool like apg
or pwgen
to generate one. If you don’t want to install an application just to generate a password, though, you may use the command below.
Note that entering this command as written will generate the same password every time. To create a password different from the one that this would generate, change the word in quotes to any other word or phrase.
echo "digital-ocean" | sha256sum
Though the generated password will not be pronounceable, it is a very strong and very long one, which is exactly the type of password required for Redis. After copying and pasting the output of that command as the new value for requirepass
, it should read:/etc/redis.conf
requirepass password_copied_from_output
If you prefer a shorter password, use the output of the command below instead. Again, change the word in quotes so it will not generate the same password as this one:
echo "digital-ocean" | sha1sum
After setting the password, save and close the file then restart Redis:
sudo systemctl restart redis.service