:title: Running a Redis service
:description: Installing and running an redis service
:keywords: docker, example, package installation, networking, redis

.. _running_redis_service:

Redis Service
=============

.. include:: example_header.inc

Very simple, no frills, Redis service attached to a web application using a link.

Create a docker container for Redis
-----------------------------------

Firstly, we create a ``Dockerfile`` for our new Redis image.

.. code-block:: bash

    FROM        ubuntu:12.10
    RUN         apt-get update
    RUN         apt-get -y install redis-server
    EXPOSE      6379
    ENTRYPOINT  ["/usr/bin/redis-server"]

Next we build an image from our ``Dockerfile``. Replace ``<your username>`` 
with your own user name.

.. code-block:: bash

    sudo docker build -t <your username>/redis .

Run the service
---------------

Use the image we've just created and name your container ``redis``.

Running the service with ``-d`` runs the container in detached mode, leaving the
container running in the background.

Importantly, we're not exposing any ports on our container. Instead we're going to 
use a container link to provide access to our Redis database.

.. code-block:: bash

    sudo docker run --name redis -d <your username>/redis

Create your web application container
-------------------------------------

Next we can create a container for our application. We're going to use the ``-link`` 
flag to create a link to the ``redis`` container we've just created with an alias of 
``db``. This will create a secure tunnel to the ``redis`` container and expose the 
Redis instance running inside that container to only this container.

.. code-block:: bash

    sudo docker run --link redis:db -i -t ubuntu:12.10 /bin/bash

Once inside our freshly created container we need to install Redis to get the 
``redis-cli`` binary to test our connection.

.. code-block:: bash

    apt-get update
    apt-get -y install redis-server
    service redis-server stop

Now we can test the connection. Firstly, let's look at the available environmental 
variables in our web application container. We can use these to get the IP and port 
of our ``redis`` container.

.. code-block:: bash

    env
    . . .
    DB_NAME=/violet_wolf/db
    DB_PORT_6379_TCP_PORT=6379
    DB_PORT=tcp://172.17.0.33:6379
    DB_PORT_6379_TCP=tcp://172.17.0.33:6379
    DB_PORT_6379_TCP_ADDR=172.17.0.33
    DB_PORT_6379_TCP_PROTO=tcp

We can see that we've got a small list of environment variables prefixed with ``DB``.
The ``DB`` comes from the link alias specified when we launched the container. Let's use 
the ``DB_PORT_6379_TCP_ADDR`` variable to connect to our Redis container.

.. code-block:: bash

    redis-cli -h $DB_PORT_6379_TCP_ADDR
    redis 172.17.0.33:6379>
    redis 172.17.0.33:6379> set docker awesome
    OK
    redis 172.17.0.33:6379> get docker
    "awesome"
    redis 172.17.0.33:6379> exit

We could easily use this or other environment variables in our web application to make a 
connection to our ``redis`` container.