Redis may be one of the best improvements since we used Memcache(d) or Alternative PHP Cache (APC). For the last couple of years, Redis is available in Magento 1 and has a big performance benefit.
What is Redis and why is it important for Magento? Well, Redis is not new; its initial release dates to the beginning of 2009—almost as young as Magento 1. Redis is a key-value storage database that stores the data in-memory of your web server. Besides this, the in-memory caches are fast and also have a persistence feature that is really important when a server reboots. All caches are not flushed during a reboot and are available in-memory when the web server is up again.
In the beginning of the Magento 1 area, we used Memcache(d) or APC, which worked very well but not as well as Redis. In Magento 1, Redis was used for a backend cache and session storage most of the time. Some websites also used it as a Full Page Cache (FPC) storage.
One other great advantage of Redis is that it has multiple database containers, one for the default cache and the other for the FPC. Although the Redis performance is better in a lot of cases, it is not the Holy Grail. There are drawbacks to its architecture.
For this recipe, we will use a Droplet created in Chapter 2, Magento 2 System Tools, at DigitalOcean, https://www.digitalocean.com/. We will be using NGINX, PHP-FPM, and a Composer-based setup, including sample data connected to a Redis server. No other prerequisites are required.
For the purpose of this recipe, let's assume that we need to create a Magento 2 Redis setup. The following steps will guide you through this:
- First, we need to install the Redis server and Redis PHP client before we can connect it to Magento. Follow the next step on the shell:
cd /opt wget http://download.redis.io/releases/redis-3.0.5.tar.gz tar xzf redis-3.0.5.tar.gz cd redis-3.0.5 make && make install
Change the version number of the current one if needed.
- Go to the
/opt/redis-3.0.5/utilsdirectory and run the following script:./install-server.sh - Commit to the following questions: (Press Enter to all of them; the default is just fine.)
Welcome to the redis service installer This script will help you easily set up a running redis server Please select the redis port for this instance: [6379] Selecting default: 6379 Please select the redis config file name [/etc/redis/6379.conf] Selected default - /etc/redis/6379.conf Please select the redis log file name [/var/log/redis_6379.log] Selected default - /var/log/redis_6379.log Please select the data directory for this instance [/var/lib/redis/6379] Selected default - /var/lib/redis/6379 Please select the redis executable path [/usr/local/bin/redis-server] Selected config: Port : 6379 Config file : /etc/redis/6379.conf Log file : /var/log/redis_6379.log Data dir : /var/lib/redis/6379 Executable : /usr/local/bin/redis-server Cli Executable : /usr/local/bin/redis-cli Is this ok? Then press ENTER to go on or Ctrl-C to abort. Copied /tmp/6379.conf => /etc/init.d/redis_6379 Installing service... Success! Starting Redis server... Installation successful!
- Now let's test our Redis server using the following command:
redis-cli –version service redis_6379 status netstat –anp | grep redis
As you can see, the Redis server is running under port 6379.
- The next important element is installing a PHP module that can communicate with the Redis server. We will use PHP Redis here (https://github.com/phpredis/phpredis).
Use the following command to install PHP Redis:
cd /opt git clone https://github.com/phpredis/phpredis.git cd phpredis phpize ./configure make && make install
- Now, we need to let PHP know there is a Redis extension available that we can use. Run the following command:
echo "extension=redis.so" | sudo tee /etc/php5/mods-available/redis.iniDepending on whether you are using PHP 5 or PHP 7, you may want to change the PHP path.
- Now we need to link the Redis PHP extension to PHP-FPM and PHP CLI. Run the following commands:
cd / ln -s /etc/php5/mods-available/redis.ini /etc/php5/fpm/conf.d/20-redis.ini ln -s /etc/php5/mods-available/redis.ini /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-redis.ini
- If everything is correct, we can restart the PHP-FPM server to activate the Redis PHP extension. Run the following command:
service php5-fpm restart - To make sure that the Redis PHP and Redis server are running together, we can use the following command:
php -r "if (new Redis() == true){ echo " OK "; }"By default, creating a
phpinfo.phppage in the root directory in Magento 2 will not work. First, you need to create thephpinfo.phpfile in the/pubdirectory. Then, you need to change the NGINX configuration (nginx.conf.sample) fromlocation ~ (index|get|static|report|404|503).php$ {tolocation ~ (index|get|static|report|404|503|phpinfo).php$ {, which is located at the bottom of the file. In Apache, we don't have an issue like this; it works by default. - Congratulations, you just finished the Redis server and PHP Redis setup. Now let's continue with the Magento 2 part.
- Open the
env.phpfile in Magento 2 located at/app/etcand add the following code at the top:
- As you can see, we are using two databases—one for the default cache and one for page_cache (Full Page Cache). Now, save your file and remove any cache in
/var/page_cacheand/var/cache. Let's open up your browser and refresh your website.If everything is configured correctly in the
env.phpfile, you should not get any errors and thear/page_cacheandvar/cachedirectories should be empty. - To check how many keys Redis received, we can run the following command from the shell:
redis-cliOn the prompt, continue with
INFO; this will give you a list of the following details:
To close the Redis terminal, use
exit. - Congratulations, you just finished configuring the Redis server and PHP Redis with Magento 2.
Let's recap and find out what we did throughout this recipe. In steps 1 through 13, we installed a Redis server and configured Magento 2 to store the backend cache.
In step 1, we installed Redis from source and compiled the code. This version is more stable than the default one available in Ubuntu. After compiling the code, we are able to use an install script to create a working setup running on port 6379.
After installing and testing the code in steps 3 and 4, we start installing the PHP Redis module. This code is pulled from GitHub and compiled from source.
In step 6, we created a redis.ini file, which is linked in step 7 with the correct PHP module directory. Before we can test it, we need to restart the PHP-FPM server and use a simple PHP command to test if everything is working fine.
In step 11, we added an additional piece of code to the env.php file, which will tell Magento 2 to store all of the cache in Redis as of now.
If you are interested in monitoring your Redis server, the next step is interesting. Clone PHPRedMin (https://github.com/sasanrose/phpredmin) in your Magento 2 root directory, /var/www/html. Make sure to change the ownership to www-data for the owner and group.
Go to your /var/www/html/pub directory and create a symbolic link using the following command:
ln –s ../phpredmin/public phpredmin
Chown the ownership of the symbolic link with the following command:
chown -h www-data:www-data phpredmin
Go to to your NGINX configuration directory, /etc/nginx/conf.d, open the default.conf file, and including the following content below error_log:
location ~ ^/phpredmin/.+.php {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(/.+)$;
set $fsn /index.php;
if (-f $document_root$fastcgi_script_name) {
set $fsn $fastcgi_script_name;
}
# php5-fpm
fastcgi_pass fastcgi_backend;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fsn;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fsn;
include fastcgi_params;
}Now save and restart your NGINX server with service nginx restart.
Before we can continue, we need to add a cronjob rule to gather our Redis data and show it in PHPRedMin. Add the following rule to your crontab.
Open crontab using crontab –e:
* * * * * cd /var/www/html/pub/phpredmin && php index.php cron/index
Open your browser and surf to http://yourdomain.com/phpredmin, and press Stats in the top menu. Now you should see the following information:
