AWS — How to Install Redis on EC2 Instance for Fast In-Memory Database

UPDATED 2020/10/16:
- All commands have been updated so that this article is up-to-date!

I have recently installed Redis on our web server at work and used it as the session engine in order to improve the performance of our web application. Redis successfully improved the session time by 99.97% compared to our old file engine. I’d like to share a quick and simple way to install Redis on your AWS EC2 server. If it is of interest to the audience, I will share a more complete and secure way to install, protect, and fine-tune Redis for production use.

Redis Logo (Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis)

Step 1 — Connect to your EC2 instance through SSH.
For demonstration purpose, I have created a free AWS Linux AMI instance. If you want some step-by-step details, please refer to section #2 in my other article AWS — How to Host a LAMP Web Application Server on AWS EC2 For Free.

Screenshot by Author

Step 2 — Run the following commands line by line to install Redis and dependencies.

sudo yum -y install gcc make # install GCC compiler
cd /usr/local/src 
sudo wget http://download.redis.io/redis-stable.tar.gz
sudo tar xvzf…