Using Redis to Speed Up Local Development With Laravel Valet

Are you working with a large site locally with Laravel Valet and it’s crawling? There’s a decent chance you’re running into performance issues with your local database.

WordPress Object Caching is a very quick way to speed up a site, local or production, by caching common queries in memory rather than fetching them from the database. We’ve covered this topic briefly before, which you can see here.

If you’re using Laravel Valet for local development, it’s actually really simple to get Redis working.

INSTALL REDIS

brew install redis

START REDIS ON SYSTEM STARTUP

ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/redis/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

START REDIS (LIKE RIGHT NOW)

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.redis.plist

INSTALL PHP REDIS EXTENSION

The version you choose here will depend on which version of PHP you are running locally. You can see this by running php -v in terminal.

Example Output:

PHP 7.0.19 (cli) (built: Jun 9 2017 16:20:40) ( NTS )

Copyright (c) 1997-2017 The PHP Group

Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Zend Technologies

In my example, I’m using PHP 7.0, so I’d install the PHP Redis extension like so:

brew install php70-redis

Just replace 70 with whatever version you are using. Examples: 56, 71

INSTALL WORDPRESS REDIS PLUGIN

There are a few good ones to choose from, but we prefer Redis Object Cache. Install it, activate it, and then go to Settings -> Redis and click “Enable Object Cache”.

You can also Network Activate the plugin. The only difference is that the Settings link is on the Plugins page itself.

THAT’S IT!

Once you’ve followed these steps, you should see a huge improvement in speed. Which will give you more time to crank out some sweet, sweet Code Poetry.