Getting started with Valkey using JavaScript

Valkey is an open source alternative to Redis. It's a community-driven, Linux Foundation project created to keep the project available for use and distribution under the open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) 3-clause license after the Redis license changes.

I think the path to Valkey was well summarised in this inaugural blog post:

I will walk through how to use Valkey for JavaScript applications using existing clients in Redis ecosystem as well as iovalkey (a friendly fork of ioredis).

Using Valkey with node-redis

node-redis is a popular and widely used client. Here is a simple program that uses the Subscriber component of the PubSub API to subscribe to a channel.

To try this with Valkey, let's start an instance using the Valkey Docker image:

Also, head over to https://valkey.io/download to get OS specific distribution, or use Homebrew (on Mac) - brew install valkey. You should now be able to use the Valkey CLI (valkey-cli).

Get the code from GitHub repo:

Start the subscriber app:

Publish a message and ensure that the subscriber is able to receive it:

Nice! We were able to write a simple application with an existing Redis client and run using Valkey (instead of Redis). Sure, this is an over-simplified example, but we there were no code changes required.

Use Valkey with ioredis

ioredis is another popular client. To be doubly sure, lets try ioredis with Valkey as well. Lets write a publisher application:

Run the publisher, and confirm that the subscriber app is able to receive it:

You should see these logs in the subscriber application:

Switch to iovalkey

As mentioned, iovalkey is a fork of ioredis. I made the following changes to port the producer code to use iovalkey:

Commented out import Redis from 'ioredis';

Added import Redis from 'iovalkey';
Installed iovalkey - npm install iovalkey

Here is the updated version - yes, this was all I needed to change (at least for this simple application):

Run the new iovalkey based publisher, and confirm that the subscriber is able to receive it:

You should see these logs in the subscriber application:

Awesome, this is going well. We are ready to sprinkle some generative AI now!

Use Valkey with LangchainJS

Along with Python, JavaScript/TypeScript is also being used in the generative AI ecosystem. LangChain is a popular framework for developing applications powered by large language models (LLMs). LangChain has JS/TS support in the form of LangchainJS.

Having worked a lot with the Go port (langchaingo), as well as Python, I wanted to try LangchainJS.

One of the common use cases is to use Redis as a chat history component in generative AI apps. LangchainJS has this built-in, so let's try it out with Valkey.

Using Valkey as chat history in Langchain

To install LangchainJS:

For the LLM, I will be using Amazon Bedrock (its supported natively with LangchainJS), but feel free to use others.

For Amazon Bedrock, you will need to configure and set up Amazon Bedrock, including requesting access to the Foundation Model(s).

Here is the chat application. As you can see, it uses the RedisChatMessageHistory component.

Run the application:

Start a conversation:

If you peek into Valkey, notice that the conversations are saved in a List:

Don't run` keys *` in production - its just for demo purposes

Using iovalkey implementation for chat history

The current implementation uses the node-redis client, but I wanted to try out iovalkey client. I am not a JS/TS expert, but it was simple enough to port the existing implementation.You can refer to the code on GitHub

As far as the client (chat) app is concerned, I only had to make a few changes to switch the implementation:

Comment out import { RedisChatMessageHistory } from "@langchain/redis";
Add import { ValkeyChatMessageHistory } from "./valkey_chat_history.js";
Replace RedisChatMessageHistory with ValkeyChatMessageHistory (while creating the memory instance)

It worked the same way as above. Feel free to give it a try!

Wrapping up

It's still early days for the Valkey (at the time of writing), and there is a long way to go. I'm really interested in the how the project evolves and also the client ecosystem for Valkey.

Happy Building!

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