Prerequisites:

In order to complete this tutorial, you will need:

• An Ubuntu Droplet with Laravel installed, you can follow the steps from this guide here on How to Install and Configure Laravel with LEMP on Ubuntu 18.04

• A Managed Redis Cluster, you can follow the steps here: How to Create Redis Database Clusters

Step 1: Install PhpRedis

In order to install the latest version of the PhpRedis extension, we can use pecl. To install pecl you need to install the PHP Extension and Application Repository or PEAR for short:

sudo apt install php-pear

You might also have to install the PHP Dev tools:

sudo apt install php-dev

Then we would want to go ahead and install this package here. To do that, just run:

sudo pecl install redis

Finally, make sure that you enable the new PHP extension by adding the following line to your php.ini:

extension = redis.io

Then restart PHP-FPM:

sudo systemctl restart php7.2-fpm.service 

Note change the php7.2 part version that you are actually using.

That way we’ve installed the latest PHP Redis module which would allow us to connect to to our Redis Cluster via TLS/SSL.

Step 2: Configure Redis

Next in your .env file you need to specify the Redis Cluster Credentials. Open the .env file with your fevauirte text editor and update the REDIS details as follows:

...
REDIS_HOST=tls://your_redis_host.db.ondigitalocean.com
REDIS_PASSWORD=your_redis_password
REDIS_PORT=25061
...

Note the tls:// part before the name of the Redis cluster, if you don’t specify it the connection would not work.

Save the file and then we will go ahead and prepare a test Controller and Route to test the connection.

Step 3: Create Controller and Route

First we will go ahead and create a Controller that we would use to test the connection to our Redis Cluster:

php artisan make:controller ConnectionChecker

Then, let’s create a method for our Redis connection test. In your controller add the following method:

...
    public static function redisTest()
    {
    $redis = Redis::connection();
        try{
           var_dump($redis->ping());
        } catch (Exception $e){
            $e->getMessage();
        }
    }
 ...

Also make sure to include your Redis facade so that you have Redis class available. Add the following at the top of your Controller:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Redis;

After that, let’s make a route so that we could reach our controller. Add the following to your routes/web.php:

Route::get('/redis', 'ConnectionChecker@redisTest');

Save the web.php file and let’s go ahead and test the connection.

Step 4: Test the connection

Now visit your hostname or IP address followed by /redis and you should be able to see something like this:

bool(true)

Video Demo

Here’s a 5-minute video demo on how to do the above:

Conclusion

As the DigitalOcean Managed Redis Cluster allows only TLS/SSL connections, we had to install the latest PHP Redis extension version which allowed our Laravel application to successfully connect to the cluster.

Hope that this helps!
Bobby