Redis in python, how do you close the connection?

Just use redis.Redis. It uses a connection pool under the hood, so you don't have to worry about managing at that level.

If you absolutely have to use a low level connection, you need to do the response handling that is normally done for you by redis.Redis.

Here's an example of executing a single command using the low level connection:

def execute_low_level(command, *args, **kwargs):
    connection = redis.Connection(**kwargs)
    try:
        connection.connect()
        connection.send_command(command, *args)

        response = connection.read_response()
        if command in redis.Redis.RESPONSE_CALLBACKS:
            return redis.Redis.RESPONSE_CALLBACKS[command](response)
        return response

    finally:
        del connection

Example usage:

response = execute_low_level(
        'HGET', 'redis:key', 'hash:key', host='localhost', port=6379)

But as I said before, redis.Redis is the way to go in 99.9% of cases.

StrictRedis doesn't implement connection semantics itself, instead it uses a connection pool, which is available as a property of a StrictRedis instance: S.connection_pool. The connection_pool object has a disconnect method to force an immediate disconnect of all connections in the pool if necessary, however when your StrictRedis object goes out of scope, the individual connections in the pool all clean themselves up without your intervention (see redis/connection.py:392-396)