NC

I’ve just released a new RubyGem which makes caching objects (and allowing them to expire) in Redis easy. It’s called reserve and the source is on GitHub.

This came from a desire to easily wrap common but slow tasks in a block that would give me the advantages of caching but not increase the code complexity significantly. We can do this by assuming that the output of most operations could be serialised as JSON and then be thrown into a Redis instance. That means that the simplest implementation could look like:

reserve = Reserve.new(Redis.new)

item = reserve.store :item do
  { value: 'this is item' }
end

Here, item will be the hash object { value: 'this is item' } that will be generated and stored on the first call, then subsequent calls will be cached in redis until they expire. By default, the expiry time is set to 10800 seconds (3 hours). After it expires, it’ll regenerate by executing the block again.

The need behind this project was in caching responses from commonly used screen scraping tools. I wanted to be able to wrap the code that was already being used for the scraping so that on subsequent requests this was reused for a set period of time. Redis works great for this because we can easily store data with SET, and the expiry is also handled by Redis with EXPIRE. But there’s lots of other operations which work well with this sort of time-based caching.

With Reserve, the goal was to take those two Redis commands and have a very thin layer between the application code and Redis. It should be possible to “wrap” a variable assignment to add this sort of caching and not require all that much more.

I also wanted to be able to support a wide range of Redis drivers and keep the rest of the dependancies as low as possible. I think it fits these requirements quite well.

Two places where this will be used are UrbanScraper and moviesapi, which I’ve been maintaining for a while.

You can browse the code on GitHub, view on RubyGems.org and also read the docs at RubyDoc.info.