redmin

A web admin for redis.

Current status of the project

The current version of redmin, v0.1.1, is considered to be experimental. Please use it with caution. This status will hopefully change as I use the tool repeatedly and with growing confidence.

Installation

redmin is meant to be used as a complement to a web application based on node.js. To install it: npm install redmin.

The dependencies of redmin are six:

• dale
• teishi
• lith
• gotoB
• redis
• PureCSS - this is an optional dependency.

Purpose

redmin is a admin tool for redis meant to be used together with an existing web application also based in redis. This makes redmin very simple for three reasons: 1) the auth/session logic can be delegated to the web application; 2) redis doesn't have to be exposed to the internet; 3) redmin does not need to be hosted independently.

Despite its simplicity, redmin will hopefully replace the redis command line for many operations, saving time and improving the safety of direct database manipulations.

Usage

redmin has to be included within a set of routes within your web application. If your application is exposed to the internet, you should put the redmin routes after a certain user is logged in as an admin - otherwise any user (or anyone) will have direct read and write database to your redis.

To connect redmin to your redis database, assign redmin.redis to your redis instance. For example:

var redis  = require ('redis').createClient ();
var redmin = require ('redmin');
redmin.redis = redis;

The following routes should only be accessible to admin users which are fully trusted.

To serve the HTML for bootstrapping the redmin client in GET /redmin (could be any other route as well), serve the output of redmin.html - this function will generate an HTML page that will load redmin. The function can be invoked without arguments, or with an object with these parameters (all of them optional):

• pure: path to PureCSS. Defaults to https://unpkg.com/purecss@1.0.0/build/pure-min.css.
• server: path to make queries to redmin. Defaults to redmin.
• gotob: path to gotoB. Defaults to redmin/gotoB.min.js.
• client: path to the redmin client. Defaults to redmin/client.js.

To serve gotoB and the redmin client, you'll need to add GET routes for accessing those two static resources.

To allow the client to reach the redmin server, add an endpoint at POST /redmin (or the endpoint you specified in the server parameter passed to redmin.client). This endpoint should invoke redmin.api with two arguments: the body received plus a callback.

If you're using cicek, this is what the redmin routes could look like:

['get', 'redmin', reply, redmin.html ()],
['post', 'redmin', function (rq, rs) {
   redmin.api (rq.body, function (error, data) {
      if (error) return cicek.reply (rs, 500, {error: error});
      cicek.reply (rs, 200, data);
   });
}],
['get', 'redmin/client.js',    cicek.file, 'node_modules/redmin/client.js'],
['get', 'redmin/gotoB.min.js', cicek.file, 'node_modules/gotob/gotoB.min.js'],

Performance

When listing keys, redmin uses scan to incrementally iterate redis keys, so it can be used against large databases in production environments without fear of blocking the database. However, large lists, sets and zsets are retrieved at once instead of being scanned - this should be changed in the future.

Please remember that redmin is experimental, for the time being.

Source code

The complete source code is contained in client.js and server.js. It is about 240 lines long.

Annotated source code will be forthcoming when the library stabilizes.

License

redmin is written by Federico Pereiro ([e-mail]) and released into the public domain.