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Build Your Own Redis in Python in Under 200 Lines of Code
Stop treating databases like black boxes. Here is how to build a functional key-value store from scratch.
Benjamin Nweke10 min read·Just now--
There’s a point that every developer has had at least once. You’re down in the code, you write redis.set("user:session", token), and it just works. You don’t think about it. You don’t have to. It just works.
I did this for about two years before curiosity got the better of me.
One evening, after a particularly long debugging session involving a caching bug I couldn’t explain, I opened a new file and typed: “How hard could it actually be to build this thing?”
Well, turns out, not that hard. And this exercise has taught me more about networking, data structures, and protocol design in one afternoon than I had learned in months of just using Redis.
By the time you’re done reading, you’ll have a functional Redis-like server up and running in Python that you can actually connect to with the real redis-cli. Not a toy. Not a mock object. A real TCP server that speaks a real protocol.
Okay, let’s dive in.
