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Using Redis on Windows with ServiceStack

Posted on 03. Apr, 2012 by clippersoft in Blog, Coding

While Redis is well supported on *nix platforms, its not so much on Windows.  As I plan on utilizing .net and SQL server, I need to use something that works in Windows.  I tried using Couchbase’s version of memcached, but never got it working properly through ServiceStack’s memcached add-on.  Plus, the install seemed very heavy for my currently simple needs to cache some data during user login.

So, I hit Google to find a Redis on Windows solution. I first came across this one…

https://github.com/dmajkic/redis/downloads

…which is nice, but is not service based.  I wanted something that will run as a Windows service and came across this fork…

https://github.com/rgl/redis

…which installs the redis port as a Windows service.

Now in my asp.net mvc site, in the ServiceStack App_Start in the container, I can register it as the Cache client…

container.Register(c => new PooledRedisClientManager("localhost:6379"));
container.Register(c => (ICacheClient)c.Resolve());

Now in my base controller, I specified…

public ICacheClient CacheClient { get; set; }
protected override void OnAuthorization(AuthorizationContext filterContext) {
using (CacheClient) {
string cacheAccountKey = IdUtils.CreateUrn(SessionKey + "account");
AccountModel account = CacheClient.Get(cacheAccountKey);
// ...
}

…which now goes against the Redis server.

I don’t know how stable it is yet, and whether I would consider this for a production site, but given the few Windows options, I might not have a lot of choices.  Thanks to ServiceStack, Redis, and the folks who helped port it to Windows to at least get me this far .