Redis Failover attempts to provides a full automatic master/slave failover solution for Ruby. Redis does not provide an automatic failover capability when configured for master/slave replication. When the master node dies, a new master must be manually brought online and assigned as the slave's new master. This manual switch-over is not desirable in high traffic sites where Redis is a critical part of the overall architecture. The existing standard Redis client for Ruby also only supports configuration for a single Redis server. When using master/slave replication, it is desirable to have all writes go to the master, and all reads go to one of the N configured slaves.

This gem attempts to address both the server and client problems. A redis failover server runs as a background daemon and monitors all of your configured master/slave nodes. When the server starts up, it automatically discovers who is the master and who are the slaves. Watchers are setup for each of the redis nodes. As soon as a node is detected as being offline, it will be moved to an "unreachable" state. If the node that went offline was the master, then one of the slaves will be promoted as the new master. All existing slaves will be automatically reconfigured to point to the new master for replication. All nodes marked as unreachable will be periodically checked to see if they have been brought back online. If so, the newly reachable nodes will be configured as slaves and brought back into the list of live servers. Note that detection of a node going down should be nearly instantaneous, since the mechanism used to keep tabs on a node is via a blocking Redis BLPOP call (no polling). This call fails nearly immediately when the node actually goes offline. To avoid false positives (i.e., intermittent flaky network interruption), the server will only mark a node as unreachable if it fails to communicate with it 3 times (this is configurable via --max-failures, see configuration options below).

This gem provides a RedisFailover::Client wrapper that is master/slave aware. The client is configured with a single host/port pair that points to redis failover server. The client will automatically connect to the server to find out the current state of the world (i.e., who's the current master and who are the current slaves). The client also acts as a load balancer in that it will automatically dispatch Redis read operations to one of N slaves, and Redis write operations to the master. If it fails to communicate with any node, it will go back and ask the server for the current list of available servers, and then optionally retry the operation.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'redis_failover'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install redis_failover

The redis failover server is a simple process that should be run as a background daemon. The server supports the following options:

Usage: redis_failover_server [OPTIONS]
    -P, --port port                  Server port
    -p, --password password          Redis password
    -n, --nodes nodes                Comma-separated redis host:port pairs
        --max-failures count         Max failures before server marks node unreachable (default 3)
    -h, --help                       Display all options

To start the server for a simple master/slave configuration, use the following:

redis_failover_server -P 3000 -n localhost:6379,localhost:6380

The server will automatically figure out who is the master and who is the slave upon startup. Note that it is a good idea to monitor the redis failover server process with a tool like Monit to ensure that it is restarted in the case of a failure.

The redis failover client must be used in conjunction with a running redis failover server. The client supports various configuration options, however the two mandatory options are the host and port of the redis failover server:

client = RedisFailover::Client.new(:host => 'localhost', :port => 3000)

The client actually employs the common redis and redis-namespace gems underneath, so this should be a drop-in replacement for your existing pure redis client usage.

The full set of options that can be passed to RedisFailover::Client are:

 :host          - redis failover server host (required)
 :port          - redis failover server port (required)
 :password      - optional password for redis nodes
 :namespace     - optional namespace for redis nodes
 :logger        - optional logger override
 :retry_failure - indicate if failures should be retried (default true)
 :max_retries   - max retries for a failure (default 3)

To learn more about Redis master/slave replication, see the Redis documentation.

Please see LICENSE for licensing details.

Ryan LeCompte

@ryanlecompte

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request