EasyRedis

EasyRedis is a simple ruby framework designed to make using Redis as a database simpler.

Redis is a very fast key-value store that supports data structures like lists, (sorted) sets, and hashes, but because of its simplicity, using Redis to store traditional database data can be somewhat tedious. EasyRedis streamlines this process.

Installation

You can just grab the gem and you're good to go:

$ gem install easyredis

Or, you can get the source with git:

$ git clone git://github.com/alecbenzer/easyredis.git

and run:

$ rake manifest
$ rake build_gemspec
$ rake install easyredis.gemspec

Basics

First, create a simple model:

require 'easyredis'

class Post < EasyRedis::Model
  field :title
  field :body
end

EasyRedis.connect

This creates a Post model and connects to a redis server running on localhost on the default port (you can pass options to EasyRedis.connect like you would to Redis.new)

We can now make post objects:

p = Post.new
p.title = "My First Post"
p.body = "This is my very first post!"

Posts are automatically given ids that we can then use to retrive them:

id = p.id
p2 = Post.find(id)
p2.title  # => "My First Post"

Or, we can choose our own ids:

p = Post.new("coolpost")
p.title = "A Cool Post"
p.body = "This post has a high level of coolness."

p2 = Post.find("coolpost")  # this is a very fast lookup
p2.title  # => "A Cool Post"

We also get a created_at field for free that we can sort by.

p.created_at              # a ruby Time object
Post.all :order => :desc  # all posts ordered by descending time
Post[n]                   # the nth (0-based indexing) post that was created

Searching and Sorting

We can also tell EasyRedis to optimize sorting and searching on certain fields. If we had defined Post as:

class Post < EasyRedis::Model
  field :title
  field :body

  sort_on :title
end

We can now sort our posts by title:

Post.sort_by :title, :order => :desc

And also search:

Post.search_by :title, "A common title"  # all posts with this title
Post.find_by :title, "My First Post"  # just one post

Implicit References

You may have noticed fields have not been given any types. EasyRedis automatically tracks the type of a field based on the type of data you assign it.

This works for references, too:

class Comment < EasyRedis::Model
  field :text
  field :post
end

c = Comment.new
c.text = "A comment!"

c.post = Post[0]