This README is under construction as we work to build a new community driven high performance key-value store.

This project was forked from the open source Redis project right before the transition to their new source available licenses.

This README is just a fast quick start document. We are currently working on a more permanent documentation page.

What is Valkey?

Valkey is a high-performance data structure server that primarily serves key/value workloads. It supports a wide range of native structures and an extensible plugin system for adding new data structures and access patterns.

Building Valkey

Valkey can be compiled and used on Linux, OSX, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD. We support big endian and little endian architectures, and both 32 bit and 64 bit systems.

It may compile on Solaris derived systems (for instance SmartOS) but our support for this platform is best effort and Valkey is not guaranteed to work as well as in Linux, OSX, and *BSD.

It is as simple as:

% make

To build with TLS support, you'll need OpenSSL development libraries (e.g. libssl-dev on Debian/Ubuntu) and run:

% make BUILD_TLS=yes

To build with systemd support, you'll need systemd development libraries (such as libsystemd-dev on Debian/Ubuntu or systemd-devel on CentOS) and run:

% make USE_SYSTEMD=yes

To append a suffix to Valkey program names, use:

% make PROG_SUFFIX="-alt"

You can build a 32 bit Valkey binary using:

% make 32bit

After building Valkey, it is a good idea to test it using:

% make test

If TLS is built, running the tests with TLS enabled (you will need tcl-tls installed):

% ./utils/gen-test-certs.sh
% ./runtest --tls

Fixing build problems with dependencies or cached build options

Valkey has some dependencies which are included in the deps directory. make does not automatically rebuild dependencies even if something in the source code of dependencies changes.

When you update the source code with git pull or when code inside the dependencies tree is modified in any other way, make sure to use the following command in order to really clean everything and rebuild from scratch:

% make distclean

This will clean: jemalloc, lua, hiredis, linenoise and other dependencies.

Also if you force certain build options like 32bit target, no C compiler optimizations (for debugging purposes), and other similar build time options, those options are cached indefinitely until you issue a make distclean command.

Fixing problems building 32 bit binaries

If after building Valkey with a 32 bit target you need to rebuild it with a 64 bit target, or the other way around, you need to perform a make distclean in the root directory of the Valkey distribution.

In case of build errors when trying to build a 32 bit binary of Valkey, try the following steps:

• Install the package libc6-dev-i386 (also try g++-multilib).
• Try using the following command line instead of make 32bit: make CFLAGS="-m32 -march=native" LDFLAGS="-m32"

Allocator

Selecting a non-default memory allocator when building Valkey is done by setting the MALLOC environment variable. Valkey is compiled and linked against libc malloc by default, with the exception of jemalloc being the default on Linux systems. This default was picked because jemalloc has proven to have fewer fragmentation problems than libc malloc.

To force compiling against libc malloc, use:

% make MALLOC=libc

To compile against jemalloc on Mac OS X systems, use:

% make MALLOC=jemalloc

Monotonic clock

By default, Valkey will build using the POSIX clock_gettime function as the monotonic clock source. On most modern systems, the internal processor clock can be used to improve performance. Cautions can be found here: http://oliveryang.net/2015/09/pitfalls-of-TSC-usage/

To build with support for the processor's internal instruction clock, use:

% make CFLAGS="-DUSE_PROCESSOR_CLOCK"

Verbose build

Valkey will build with a user-friendly colorized output by default. If you want to see a more verbose output, use the following:

% make V=1

Running Valkey

To run Valkey with the default configuration, just type:

% cd src
% ./valkey-server

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

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

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

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

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

Running Valkey with TLS:

Please consult the TLS.md file for more information on how to use Valkey with TLS.

Playing with Valkey

You can use valkey-cli to play with Valkey. Start a valkey-server instance, then in another terminal try the following:

% cd src
% ./valkey-cli
valkey> ping
PONG
valkey> set foo bar
OK
valkey> get foo
"bar"
valkey> incr mycounter
(integer) 1
valkey> incr mycounter
(integer) 2
valkey>

Installing Valkey

In order to install Valkey binaries into /usr/local/bin, just use:

% make install

You can use make PREFIX=/some/other/directory install if you wish to use a different destination.

Note: For compatibility with Redis, we create symlinks from the Redis names (redis-server, redis-cli, etc.) to the Valkey binaries installed by make install. The symlinks are created in same directory as the Valkey binaries. The symlinks are removed when using make uninstall. The creation of the symlinks can be skipped by setting the makefile variable USE_REDIS_SYMLINKS=no.

make install will just install binaries in your system, but will not configure init scripts and configuration files in the appropriate place. This is not needed if you just want to play a bit with Valkey, but if you are installing it the proper way for a production system, we have a script that does this for Ubuntu and Debian systems:

% cd utils
% ./install_server.sh

Note: install_server.sh will not work on Mac OSX; it is built for Linux only.

The script will ask you a few questions and will setup everything you need to run Valkey properly as a background daemon that will start again on system reboots.

You'll be able to stop and start Valkey using the script named /etc/init.d/valkey_<portnumber>, for instance /etc/init.d/valkey_6379.

Code contributions

Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md. For security bugs and vulnerabilities, please see SECURITY.md.