Migrating to v2.0¶

Summary¶

aioredis v2.0 is now a completely compliant asyncio-native implementation of redis-py. The entire core and public API has been re-written to follow redis-py‘s implementation as closely as possible. This means there are some major changes to the connection interface, but we now have an interface that is completely consistent across the two libraries, so porting from redis-py to aioredis should (in theory) be as easy as changing some imports and adding await statements where needed.

Motivations¶

As of December, 2019, this library had been abandoned. The code had grown stale, issues were piling up, and we were rapidly becoming out-of-date with Redis’s own feature-set. In light of this, the decision was made to ensure that the barrier to support for potential maintainers or contributors would be minimized. A running port of redis-py accomplishes this.

Additionally, embracing redis-py as the de-facto implementation lowers the barrier to entry for new adopters, as the interface is now nearly identical.

Connecting to Redis¶

Connecting to redis is no longer done by calling await aioredis.create_pool(...). Instead, the default mode of initialization is the same as redis-py:

import asyncio

import aioredis


async def main():
    # Redis client bound to single connection (no auto reconnection).
    redis = aioredis.from_url(
        "redis://localhost", encoding="utf-8", decode_responses=True
    )
    async with redis.client() as conn:
        await conn.set("my-key", "value")
        val = await conn.get("my-key")
    print(val)


async def redis_pool():
    # Redis client bound to pool of connections (auto-reconnecting).
    redis = aioredis.from_url(
        "redis://localhost", encoding="utf-8", decode_responses=True
    )
    await redis.set("my-key", "value")
    val = await redis.get("my-key")
    print(val)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())
    asyncio.run(redis_pool())

As you can see, the from_url(...) methods are not coroutine functions. This is because connections are created lazily rather than pre-filled, in keeping with the pattern established in redis-py. If you have a need to establish a connection immediately, you can use aioredis.Redis.ping to fetch a connection and ping your redis instance.

Pipelines and Transactions (Multi/Exec)¶

In the previous implementation, Pipeline was essentially an abstraction over asyncio.gather. Every command set to the Pipeline was immediately pushed to Redis in its own task.

This had a few surprising side-effects:

aioredis Pipelines were much slower than redis-py Pipelines.
An exception in one command didn’t necessarily halt execution of the Pipeline.
We weren’t taking full advantage of Redis’s Multi/Bulk protocol.
We could potentially overload Redis with too many individual commands at once.

The aioredis.Pipeline is now fully compliant with the original redis-py implementation:

import asyncio

import aioredis


async def main():
    redis = await aioredis.from_url("redis://localhost")
    async with redis.pipeline(transaction=True) as pipe:
        ok1, ok2 = await (pipe.set("key1", "value1").set("key2", "value2").execute())
    assert ok1
    assert ok2


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

import asyncio

import aioredis


async def main():
    redis = aioredis.from_url("redis://localhost")
    await redis.delete("foo", "bar")
    async with redis.pipeline(transaction=True) as pipe:
        res = await pipe.incr("foo").incr("bar").execute()
    print(res)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

Cleaning Up¶

You may have noticed in the examples above that we don’t explicitly close our connections when the main function exits. This is because, again like redis-py, our clients and connections have implemented __del__ methods, so will attempt to automatically clean up any open connections when garbage-collected.

If, however, you find you need to manage your connections lifecycle yourself, you can do so like this:

import asyncio
import aioredis


async def main():
    pool = aioredis.ConnectionPool.from_url(
        "redis://localhost", decode_responses=True
    )
    meanings = aioredis.Redis(connection_pool=pool)
    try:
        await meanings.set("life", 42)
        print(f"The answer: {await meanings.get('life')}")
    finally:
        await pool.disconnect()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

What’s New¶

aioredis is now fully compliant with Redis 6.0 including:

ACL/RBAC
Full PubSub support (2.8.0)

Some of these features were partially implemented or implemented with many known issues, but are now considered stable.

What’s Gone¶

We no longer ship with a Channel abstraction over PubSub. This implementation was buggy and not well understood. Additionally, there is no such abstraction in our source implementation (redis-py).

We have dropped factory functions create_redis(), create_redis_pool(), create_pool() and etc, after making the project compliant with redis-py. Commonly you don’t need to touch underlying connection pool and connections directly. The Redis client manages a connection pool and acquire connection automatically when executing redis commands. From aioredis 2.x, you could configure the connection pool during Redis.__init__().

Talking about the connection pool, we have the dropped the pre-filling design and switch to redis-py‘s lazy-filling degisn. In aioredis 1.x, factory create_pool() initializes a connection pool and pre-fill the pool with some connections. The number is controlled by parameter minsize. While in aioredis 2.x, the connection pool is lazy-filled: connection is only created when client Redis tries to acquire a connection and there’s no available connection in the pool.

We have dropped command-level encoding support, like .get(encoding="utf-8"). You now set the encoding globally on connetions and connection pools during initialization with the encoding parameter. You can also use the decode_responses parameter to control whether or not aioredis-py automatically decodes responses from Redis using the given encoding.

Public API .eval() is changed from .eval(script, keys=[], args=[]) to .eval(script, len(keys), *(keys + args)). The same thing happens on .evalsha().

Next Steps¶

You’re encouraged to review our Getting Started page, API docs, and Examples page to get up-to-date on the latest aioredis implementation.