Appendix A. Quick and dirty setup
Depending on your platform, setting up Redis can range from easy to difficult. I’ve broken down installation instructions into sections for the three major platforms. Feel free to skip ahead to your platform, which will also include instructions for installing and configuring Python and the Redis client libraries for Python on your system.
If you’re using a Debian-derived Linux, your first instinct will be to apt-get install redis-server, but this is probably the wrong thing to do. Depending on your version of Debian or Ubuntu, you could be installing an old version of Redis. As an example, if you’re using Ubuntu 10.4, you’d be downloading Redis 1.2.6, which was released in March 2010 and doesn’t support many of the commands that we use.
In this section, you’ll first install the build tools because you’ll compile Redis from scratch. Then you’ll download, compile, and install Redis. After Redis is running, you’ll download the Redis client libraries for Python.
To get started, make sure that you have all of the standard required build tools installed by fetching and downloading make, as can be seen in the following listing.
When your build tools are installed (they were probably installed before; this was a verification step), you’ll take these steps: