Tag: redis

How to Access Redis over TLS/SSL

If you are trying to purchase Managed Redis Database, from companies like digitalocean, then, you would get access to those Redis servers, only over TLS/SSL support. Unfortunately, by default redis-cli does not ship with TLS support, hence, you need to either use Tunnel to access redis instance through redis-cli or use different tool for your purpose.

Access Your Redis Instance using Python

If you are developing your application using python, and using a managed redis database, then, you would have to make the redis connection over TLS/SSL. This can be done by setting the ‘SSL’ to True, in the Redis constructor. Here is an example:

import redis

r = redis.Redis(host='db-redis-sfo2-89862-do-user-4233327-0.b.db.ondigitalocean.com', port=25061, password='abcdhjnmjtxeupp', decode_responses=True, ssl=True)

As you can see, I have set the ssl to True at the end, to set the connection over TLS/SSL.

Access Your Redis from Command Line using Redli

If you want to have access to your redis instance through a command line tool, then using redli is my first line choice. Configuring stunnel with redis-cli is also possible, but it would be another topic of discussion here.

Let’s see, how can we install redli:

Redli is a tool developed by IBM with TLS/SSL support. It is written in Golang. You may download a version for Linux from the IBMCloud Github repo and start using it:

~ wget https://github.com/IBM-Cloud/redli/releases/download/v0.4.4/redli_0.4.4_linux_amd64.tar.gz
~ tar -xvzf redli_0.4.4_linux_amd64.tar.gz
~ cp redli /usr/bin/
~ chmod +x /usr/bin/redli

Now, you may use redli to connect to your Redis database with TLS enabled as following:

redli --tls -h db-redis-sfo2-89862-do-user-4233327-0.b.db.ondigitalocean.com -p 25061 -a abcdhjnmjtxeupp

See how ‘–tls’ is enabled to access redis over TLS here. Hope this helps.

How to Do Full Page Caching in Laravel / How to Cache Views in Laravel

Most of the developers use Laravel Cache for database query result caching. Although, this is efficient, but the ultimate caching performance enhancement is achieved through FPC or Full Page Caching for web apps. Laravel doesn’t give any hint, neither describe how to do this in their documentation, which is why the article.

What is Full Page Caching?

Technically a full page caching means, to cache the html response from an app. In FPC, it is generally accepted to use the route/view as the cache key concatenating or mixing with the VERB in request header.

When a user requests for a route, we usually pull a controller behind the route to process and prepare several data before sending them to views for response. But what if the data hasn’t changed since the last request? That technically means the response hasn’t changed, right? This essentially says, you can cache the full response and skip the whole controller processing, even pulling the view, instead, only put the Cached data in the response. Theoretically, this is the best form of caching mechanism for ‘Web Based’ solutions like Ecommerce, Newspapers, Blogs etc. This technique is known as FPC or Full Page Caching.

Laravel Cache

Laravel is best known for it’s documentation. Although, the Laravel Cache documentation, only follows how to cache the database queries, not the views. To understand how to do FPC using Laravel, let’s first look at how our views are usually formed. 

class NewsController extends Controller {
    public function index() {
        $news = News::all();
        return view('news.index')->with('news', $news);
    }
}

Here the view() helper method, returns a Laravel View instance. It doesn’t return the html or renders one. So who does it? Laravel does it for you under the hood, and pass it to Response class. Now to cache the views, you have to return the html and save it to cache. There are basically two ways of doing it.

The easiest way is to use a function called ‘render()’ that is available to View class which returns the html of the created View instance. Here is how you may convert the above controller method to return from cache:

class NewsController extends Controller {
    public function index() {
        if ( Cache::has('news_index') ) {
            return Cache::get('news_index');
        } else {
            $news = News::all();
            $cachedData = view('news.index')->with('news', $news)->render();
            Cache::put('news_index', $cachedData);                                         
            return $cachedData;           
        }  
    }
}

This should be it, simple, ha!

Here is more! I looked at the laravel documentation a bit more, and I could find there is another way you can do the above. This is using the Response class. view method returns a Views instance, while Response instance is able to return rendered html based on view. Here is how to do this:

Response::view('news.index')->with('news', $news);

This also means our idea that Laravel does the rendering under the hood is a bit wrong, it basically shoots the views instance to a response instance (which it has to) and returns it, that put the rendered html in the final response. We can now cache the above output and serve for future requests without entering the controller’s processing!