Using Redis with WordPress

There are a number of Redis libraries for WordPress, only some of which are compatible with Platform.sh. We have tested and recommend devgeniem/wp-redis-object-cache-dropin, which requires extremely little configuration.

Requirements 

Add a Redis service 

First you need to create a Redis service. In your .platform/services.yaml file, add the following:

rediscache:
    type: redis:5.0

That will create a service named rediscache, of type redis, specifically version 5.0.

Expose the Redis service to your application 

In your .platform.app.yaml file, we now need to open a connection to the new Redis service. Under the relationships section, add the following:

relationships:
    redis: "rediscache:redis"

The key (left side) is the name that will be exposed to the application in the PLATFORM_RELATIONSHIPS variable. The right hand side is the name of the service we specified above (rediscache) and the endpoint (redis). If you named the service something different above, change rediscache to that.

Add the Redis PHP extension 

Because the Redis extension for PHP has been known to have BC breaks at times, we do not bundle a specific verison by default. Instead, we provide a script to allow you to build your desired version in the build hook. See the PHP-Redis page for a simple-to-install script and instructions.

Add the Redis library 

If using Composer to build WordPress, you can install the WP-Redis library with the following Composer command:

composer require devgeniem/wp-redis-object-cache-dropin

Then commit the resulting changes to your composer.json and composer.lock files.

Configuration 

To enable the WP-Redis cache the object-cache.php file needs to be copied from the downloaded package to the wp-content directory. Add the following line to the bottom of your build hook:

cp -r wp-content/wp-redis-object-cache-dropin/object-cache.php web/wp/wp-content/object-cache.php

It should now look something like:

hooks:
    build: |
        set -e
        bash install-redis.sh 5.1.1
        cp -r wp-content/wp-redis-object-cache-dropin/object-cache.php web/wp/wp-content/object-cache.php        

Next, place the following code in the wp-config.php file, somewhere before the final require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php'); line.

<?php

if ($config->hasRelationship('redis') && extension_loaded('redis')) {
		$credentials = $config->credentials('redis');

		define('WP_REDIS_CLIENT', 'pecl');
		define('WP_REDIS_HOST', $credentials['host']);
		define('WP_REDIS_PORT', $credentials['port']);
	}

That will define 3 constants that the WP-Redis extension will look for in order to connect to the Redis server. If you used a different name for the relationship above, change it accordingly. This code will have no impact when run on a local development environment.

That’s it. There is no Plugin to enable through the WordPress administrative interface. Commit the above changes and push.

Verifying Redis is running 

Run this command in a SSH session in your environment redis-cli -h redis.internal info. You should run it before you push all this new code to your repository.

This should give you a baseline of activity on your Redis installation. There should be very little memory allocated to the Redis cache.

After you push this code, you should run the command and notice that allocated memory will start jumping.