There are several reasons to develop in an isolated environment, like keeping your workstation clean, and developing for a different Linux distribution. The most general option for an isolated environment is a virtual machine (it's very easy to set one up using Vagrant). Docker is even a more agile solution, as it offers an almost instant solution:

ts=$(docker run -d -it -v $PWD:/build debian:bullseye bash)
docker exec -it $ts bash

Then, from within the container, cd /build and go on as usual. In this mode, all installations remain in the scope of the Docker container. Upon exiting the container, you can either re-invoke the container with the above docker exec or commit the state of the container to an image and re-invoke it on a later stage:

docker commit $ts ts1
docker stop $ts
ts=$(docker run -d -it -v $PWD:/build ts1 bash)
docker exec -it $ts bash

Installing prerequisites

To build and test RedisTimeSeries you needs to install several packages, depending on the underlying OS. Currently, we support the Ubuntu/Debian, CentOS, Fedora, and macOS.

If you have gnu make installed, you can execute

cd RedisTimeSeries
make setup

Alternatively, just invoke the following:

cd RedisTimeSeries
git submodule update --init --recursive    
./deps/readies/bin/getpy3
./system-setup.py

Note that system-setup.py will install various packages on your system using the native package manager and pip. This requires root permissions (i.e. sudo) on Linux.

If you prefer to avoid that, you can:

• Review system-setup.py and install packages manually,
• Use an isolated environment like explained above,
• Utilize a Python virtual environment, as Python installations known to be sensitive when not used in isolation.

Installing Redis

As a rule of thumb, you're better off running the latest Redis version.

If your OS has a Redis package, you can install it using the OS package manager.

Otherwise, you can invoke ./deps/readies/bin/getredis.

Getting help

make help provides a quick summary of the development features.

Building from source

make will build RedisTimeSeries.

Build artifacts are placed into bin/linux-x64-release (or similar, according to your platform and build options).

Use make clean to remove built artifacts. make clean ALL=1 will remove the entire binary artifacts directory.

Running Redis with RedisTimeSeries

The following will run redis and load the RedisTimeSeries module.

make run

You can open redis-cli in another terminal to interact with it.

Running tests

The module includes a basic set of unit tests and integration tests:

• C unit tests, located in src/tests, run by make unit_tests.
• Python integration tests (enabled by RLTest), located in tests/flow, run by make flow_tests.

One can run all tests by invoking make test. A single test can be run using the TEST parameter, e.g. make flow_test TEST=file:name.

Debugging

To build for debugging (enabling symbolic information and disabling optimization), run make DEBUG=1. You can the use make run DEBUG=1 to invoke gdb. In addition to the usual way to set breakpoints in gdb, it is possible to use the BB macro to set a breakpoint inside the RedisTimeSeries code. It will only have an effect when running under gdb.

Similarly, Python tests in a single-test mode, one can set a breakpoint by using the BB() function inside a test. This will invoke pudb.

The two methods can be combined: one can set a breakpoint within a flow test, and when reached, connect gdb to a redis-server process to debug the module.