Since it’s now featured on the redis homepage, I figure I should tell people about my fork of erldis, an erlang redis client focused on synchronous operations.

Synchronicity

The original client, which still exists as erldis_client.erl, implements asynchronous pipelining. This means you send a bunch of redis commands, then collect all the results at the end. This didn’t work for me, as I needed a client that could handle parallel synchronous requests from multiple concurrent processes. So I copied erldis_client.erl to erldis_sync_client.erl and modified it to send replies back as soon as they are received from redis (in FIFO order). Many thanks to dialtone_ for writing the original erldis app as I’m not sure I would’ve created the synchronous client without it. And thanks to cstar for patches, such as making erldis_sync_client the default client for all functions in erldis.erl.

Extras

In addition to the synchronous client, I’ve added some extra functions and modules to make interfacing with redis more erlangy. Here’s a brief overview…

erldis_sync_client:transact

erldis_sync_client:transact is analagous to mnesia:transaction in that it does a unit of work against a redis database, like so:

starts erldis_sync_client calls your function with the client PID as the argument stops the client returns the result of your function

The goal being to reduce boilerplate start/stop code.

erldis_dict module

erldis_dict provides similar semantics as the dict module in stdlib, using redis key-value commands.

erldis_list module

erldis_list provides a number of functions operating on redis lists, inspired by the array, lists, and queue modules in stdlib. You must pass in both the client PID and a redis list key.

erldis_sets module

erldis_sets works like the sets module, but you have to provide both the client PID and a redis set key.

Usage

Despite the low version numbers, I’ve been successfully using erldis as a component in parallel/distributed information retrieval (in conjunction with plists), and for accessing data shared with python / django apps. It’s a fully compliant erlang application that you can include in your target system release structure.

If also you’re using erldis for your redis needs, I’d love to hear about it.