When developing or testing your application, you might not want or can not use Upstash over the internet. In this case, you can use a community project called Serverless Redis HTTP (SRH) created by Scott Hiett.

SRH is a Redis proxy and connection pooler that uses HTTP rather than the Redis binary protocol. The aim of this project is to be entirely compatible with Upstash, and work with any Upstash supported Redis version.

We are working with Scott together to keep SRH up to date with the latest Upstash features.

Use cases for SRH:

  • For usage in your CI pipelines, creating Upstash databases is tedious, or you have lots of parallel runs.
  • For usage inside of Kubernetes, or any network whereby the Redis server is not exposed to the internet.
  • For local development environments, where you have a local Redis server running, or require offline access.

Setting up SRH

Via Docker command

If you have a locally running Redis server, you can simply start an SRH container that connects to it. In this example, SRH will be running on port 8080.

docker run \
    -it -d -p 8080:80 --name srh \
    -e SRH_MODE=env \
    -e SRH_TOKEN=your_token_here \
    -e SRH_CONNECTION_STRING="redis://your_server_here:6379" \
    hiett/serverless-redis-http:latest

Via Docker Compose

If you wish to run in Kubernetes, this should contain all the basics would need to set that up. However, be sure to read the Configuration Options, because you can create a setup whereby multiple Redis servers are proxied.

version: "3"
services:
  redis:
    image: redis
    ports:
      - "6379:6379"
  serverless-redis-http:
    ports:
      - "8079:80"
    image: hiett/serverless-redis-http:latest
    environment:
      SRH_MODE: env
      SRH_TOKEN: example_token
      SRH_CONNECTION_STRING: "redis://redis:6379" # Using `redis` hostname since they're in the same Docker network.

In GitHub Actions

SRH works nicely in GitHub Actions because you can run it as a container in a job’s services. Simply start a Redis server, and then SRH alongside it. You don’t need to worry about a race condition of the Redis instance not being ready, because SRH doesn’t create a Redis connection until the first command comes in.

name: Test @upstash/redis compatability
on:
  push:
  workflow_dispatch:

env:
  SRH_TOKEN: example_token

jobs:
  container-job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container: denoland/deno
    services:
      redis:
        image: redis/redis-stack-server:6.2.6-v6 # 6.2 is the Upstash compatible Redis version
      srh:
        image: hiett/serverless-redis-http:latest
        env:
          SRH_MODE: env # We are using env mode because we are only connecting to one server.
          SRH_TOKEN: ${{ env.SRH_TOKEN }}
          SRH_CONNECTION_STRING: redis://redis:6379

    steps:
      # You can place your normal testing steps here. In this example, we are running SRH against the upstash/upstash-redis test suite.
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          repository: upstash/upstash-redis

      - name: Run @upstash/redis Test Suite
        run: deno test -A ./pkg
        env:
          UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL: http://srh:80
          UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN: ${{ env.SRH_TOKEN }}

A huge thanks goes out to Scott for creating this project, and for his continued efforts to keep it up to date with Upstash.