Support Database URLs

[kennethreitz]

A trend in platform as a service providers is to use Database URLs to supp. They're quickly becoming a standard.

SQLAlchemy and RedisToGo, for example, uses them for database connections.

I'd love to implement this at the redis-py level, if appropriate.

That would turn this code:

    import os
    import urlparse
    from redis import Redis

    redis_url = os.getenv('REDISTOGO_URL')

    url = urlparse.urlparse(redis_url)
    r = redis.Redis(
        host=url.hostname, 
        port=url.port, 
        db=0, 
        password=url.password)

Into this:

    import os
    from redis.utils import from_databaseurl

    redis_url = os.getenv('REDISTOGO_URL')
    r = from_databaseurl(redis_url)

[andymccurdy]

When 2.4 came out, we talked about doing this with the internal refactoring of how connections worked in redis-py. Ultimately, ended up punting on the idea for several reasons. Most notably, there's a number of options when creating a redis client instance that aren't able to be elegantly represented in a URL, e.g. ConnectionClass and unix_socket_path.

However, I do see the value in what you're proposing, especially for services like Heroku/RedisToGo. Your suggestion of using a factory-like function might make a lot of my initial concern go away.

[kennethreitz]

I agree with your concern, which is why I think it should be a helper function instead of a first-class member of the API.

So, you're 👍 to this? I can send a pull request if you'd like :)

[andymccurdy]

Send away!

[kennethreitz]

@andymccurdy excellent :)

Do you think the function should exist at the root namespace (e.g. redis.from_url or redis.utils.from_url)?

[andymccurdy]

Root namespace. It's where you create a client instance the "normal way".

[kennethreitz]

Sent! 💨

[pietern]

We had the same problem for redis-rb, and avoided representing a remote as an URL for the same reasons. To still allow specifying the remote using an URL we take an :url option to Redis.new. This probably translates to using a keyword(?) in Python.