Redis on Windows

• This is a port for Windows based on Redis.
• We officially support the 64-bit version only. Although you can build the 32-bit version from source if desired.
• You can download the latest unsigned binaries and the unsigned MSI installer from the release page.
• For releases prior to 2.8.17.1, the binaries can found in a zip file inside the source archive, under the bin/release folder.
• Signed binaries are available through NuGet and Chocolatey.
• Redis can be installed as a Windows Service.

Windows-specific changes

• There is a replacement for the UNIX fork() API that simulates the copy-on-write behavior using a memory mapped file on 2.8. Version 3.0 is using a similar behavior but dropped the memory mapped file in favor of the system paging file.
• In 3.0 we switch the default memory allocator from dlmalloc to jemalloc that is supposed to do a better job at managing the heap fragmentation.
• Because Redis makes some assumptions about the values of file descriptors, we have built a virtual file descriptor mapping layer.

Redis release notes

There are two current active branches: 2.8 and 3.0.

• Redis on UNIX 2.8 release notes
• Redis on Windows 2.8 release notes
• Redis on UNIX 3.0 release notes
• Redis on Windows 3.0 release notes

How to configure and deploy Redis on Windows

• Memory Configuration for 2.8
• Memory Configuration for 3.0
• Windows Service Documentation
• Redis on Windows
• Windows Service Documentation

How to build Redis using Visual Studio

You can use the free Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition. Regardless which Visual Studio edition you use, make sure you have updated to Update 5, otherwise you will get a "illegal use of this type as an expression" error.

• Open the solution file msvs\redisserver.sln in Visual Studio, select a build configuration (Debug or Release) and target (x64) then build.

  This should create the following executables in the msvs$(Target)$(Configuration) folder:

  • redis-server.exe
  • redis-benchmark.exe
  • redis-cli.exe
  • redis-check-dump.exe
  • redis-check-aof.exe

Testing

To run the Redis test suite some manual work is required:

• The tests assume that the binaries are in the src folder. Use mklink to create a symbolic link to the files in the msvs\x64\Debug|Release folders. You will need symbolic links for src\redis-server, src\redis-benchmark, src\redis-check-aof, src\redis-check-dump, src\redis-cli, and src\redis-sentinel.
• The tests make use of TCL. This must be installed separately.
• To run the cluster tests against 3.0, Ruby On Windows is required.
• To run the tests you need to have a Unix shell on your machine, or MinGW tools in your path. To execute the tests, run the following command: "tclsh8.5.exe tests/test_helper.tcl --clients N", where N is the number of parallel clients . If a Unix shell is not installed you may see the following error message: "couldn't execute "cat": no such file or directory".
• By default the test suite launches 16 parallel tests, but 2 is the suggested number.