This tutorial will take you step by step through the process of building a Redis client and server. We will start with the basics of asynchronous programming with Rust and build up from there. We will implement a subset of Redis commands but will get a comprehensive tour of Tokio.

Mini-Redis

The project that you will build in this tutorial is available as Mini-Redis on GitHub. Mini-Redis is designed with the primary goal of learning Tokio, and is therefore very well commented, but this also means that Mini-Redis is missing some features you would want in a real Redis library. You can find production-ready Redis libraries on crates.io.

We will use Mini-Redis directly in the tutorial. This allows us to use parts of Mini-Redis in the tutorial before we implement them later in the tutorial.

Getting Help

At any point, if you get stuck, you can always get help on Discord or GitHub discussions. Don't worry about asking "beginner" questions. We all start somewhere and are happy to help.

Prerequisites

Readers should already be familiar with Rust. The Rust book is an excellent resource to get started with.

While not required, some experience with writing networking code using the Rust standard library or another language can be helpful.

No pre-existing knowledge of Redis is required.

Rust

Before getting started, you should make sure that you have the Rust toolchain installed and ready to go. If you don't have it, the easiest way to install it is using rustup.

This tutorial requires a minimum of Rust version 1.45.0, but the most recent stable version of Rust is recommended.

To check that Rust is installed on your computer, run the following:

$ rustc --version

You should see output like rustc 1.46.0 (04488afe3 2020-08-24).

Mini-Redis server

Next, install the Mini-Redis server. This will be used to test our client as we build it.

$ cargo install mini-redis

Make sure that it was successfully installed by starting the server:

$ mini-redis-server

Then, in a separate terminal window, try to get the key foo using mini-redis-cli

$ mini-redis-cli get foo

You should see (nil).

Ready to go

That's it, everything is ready to go. Go to the next page to write your first asynchronous Rust application.