Redis and Express are tools that provide a simple and clean approach to their problem domains. What follows is a Docker/Docker Compose v2 setup.

The repo is available at: https://github.com/HugoDF/express-redis-docker.

The docker-compose.yml is available at: github.com/HugoDF/express-redis-docker/docker-compose.yml

Redis is “an open source, in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker”. It’s as simple and unopinionated as a database as it gets, it’s known for its performance and simplicity as a key-value store. It has great flexibility and can also be used as a message queue, circular buffer (and pretty much anything else a developer can come up with short of a relational database).

Express is a “fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js”. In other words, it’s a wrapper around Node’s server, that provides a way to write what’s called “middleware” to share and compose functionality across HTTP endpoints as well as define said endpoints.

Getting Redis and Express to work together is trivial. Getting Redis and Express to work together in a way that’s fool and future-proof, and reproducible across local and deployed environments, is slightly harder. That’s where Docker and Docker Compose come in.

Docker is a containerisation system, Docker Compose is a way to define how multiple Docker containers interact. In the context of Node web application development, Docker tends to be used to define a container that has the required system-level dependencies (eg. Node version, any extra database drivers). Docker Compose would be used to define dependencies outside of the Node application, for example databases.