Could not connect to Redis at 127.0.0.1:6379: Connection refused with homebrew

After installing redis, type from terminal:

redis-server

And Redis-Server will be started

I found this question while trying to figure out why I could not connect to redis after starting it via brew services start redis.

tl;dr

Depending on how fresh your machine or install is you're likely missing a config file or a directory for the redis defaults.

1. You need a config file at /usr/local/etc/redis.conf. Without this file redis-server will not start. You can copy over the default config file and modify it from there with

   cp /usr/local/etc/redis.conf.default /usr/local/etc/redis.conf
   

2. You need /usr/local/var/db/redis/ to exist. You can do this easily with

   mkdir -p /usr/local/var/db/redis
   

Finally just restart redis with brew services restart redis.

How do you find this out!?

I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out if redis wasn't using the defaults through homebrew and what port it was on. Services was misleading because even though redis-server had not actually started, brew services list would still show redis as "started." The best approach is to use brew services --verbose start redis which will show you that the log file is at /usr/local/var/log/redis.log. Looking in there I found the smoking gun(s)

Fatal error, can't open config file '/usr/local/etc/redis.conf'

or

Can't chdir to '/usr/local/var/db/redis/': No such file or directory

Thankfully the log made the solution above obvious.

Can't I just run redis-server?

You sure can. It'll just take up a terminal or interrupt your terminal occasionally if you run redis-server &. Also it will put dump.rdb in whatever directory you run it in (pwd). I got annoyed having to remove the file or ignore it in git so I figured I'd let brew do the work with services.

If after install you need to run redis on all time, just type in terminal:

redis-server &

Running redis using upstart on Ubuntu

I've been trying to understand how to setup systems from the ground up on Ubuntu. I just installed redis onto the box and here's how I did it and some things to look out for.

To install:

sudo apt-get install redis-server

That will create a redis user and install the init.d script for it. Since upstart is now the replacement for using init.d, I figure I should convert it to run using upstart.

To disable the default init.d script for redis:

sudo update-rc.d redis-server disable

Then create /etc/init/redis-server.conf with the following script:

description "redis server"

start on runlevel [23]
stop on shutdown

exec sudo -u redis /usr/bin/redis-server /etc/redis/redis.conf

respawn

What this is the script for upstart to know what command to run to start the process. The last line also tells upstart to keep trying to respawn if it dies.

One thing I had to change in /etc/redis/redis.conf is daemonize yes to daemonize no. What happens if you don't change it then redis-server will fork and daemonize itself, and the parent process goes away. When this happens, upstart thinks that the process has died/stopped and you won't have control over the process from within upstart.

Now you can use the following commands to control your redis-server:

sudo start redis-server
sudo restart redis-server
sudo stop redis-server

Hope this was helpful!