Introduction

Redis stands for Remote Dictionary Server. Redis is a data structure that stores data in key-value pairs. All Redis data is stored in memory, enabling high data access rates. Unlike regular databases in Redis, it takes much less time to read and write to memory and supports millions of operations per second.

This article will explain how to install and secure Redis on CentOS 7.

Prerequisites

A root or non-root user with sudo privileges.

Install Redis

Enable access to the EPEL repository.
```
# sudo yum -y install epel-release
```
Install Redis.
```
# sudo yum install redis -y
```
Start the Redis service.
```
# sudo systemctl start redis.service
```
Enable the Redis service.
```
# sudo systemctl enable redis
```
Test the Redis setup with the below command.
```
# redis-cli ping
```
If Redis is running on your system above command print PONG as the response.

Configure Redis

Open the original Redis configuration file.
```
# sudo vi /etc/redis.conf
```
Search the bind and remove localhost IP and bind your IP address.
After making all the necessary changes, save the file, exit, and restart the Redis services.
```
# systemctl restart redis
```

Securing Redis with Password Authentication

The password authentication for Redis will give you access control to your Redis server. This little layer of security will enhance your Redis server security.

Open a Redis configuration file.
```
# sudo vi /etc/redis.conf
```
Search the SECURITY section and then uncomment "requirepass" and provide the password as shown below.
```
requirepass foobared
```
Change the ‘foobared’ with your strong password.
Restart the Redis server.
```
# systemctl restart redis
```

Test Redis server connectivity

Connect to the Redis client using redis-cli -h <your-server-ip> -p 6379 .
```
# redis-cli -h 207.199.149.75 -p 6379
```
You need to authenticate before invoking any command on the Redis CLI. Here we pass the password provided in the earlier step.
```
AUTH foobared
```
After connecting to the Redis server let's try to set and get a new key in Redis.
```
set key1 "test_key"
get key1
```