Connect using PHP for Public Cloud Databases for Valkey

Objective

Public Cloud Databases allow you to focus on building and deploying cloud applications while OVHcloud takes care of the database infrastructure and maintenance in operational conditions.

This guide explains how to connect to a Valkey service instance with one of the world's most famous programming language: PHP.

Requirements

• A Public Cloud project in your OVHcloud account
• A Valkey service running on your OVHcloud Public Cloud Databases (this guide can help you to meet this requirement)
• Configure your Valkey service to accept incoming connections
• A PHP environment with a stable version and public network connectivity (Internet). This guide was made using PHP 8.4.

Concept

A Valkey service can be managed through multiple ways. One of the easiest, yet powerful, is to use a Command Line Interface (CLI), as shown in our guide: Connect with CLI.

Another way is to interact directly using programming languages, such as PHP. Valkey has multiple PHP clients to connect to and manage an instance from code. See the official list of Valkey clients for the latest information.

We will need to set up our PHP environment with the phpredis client, then configure our Public Cloud Databases for Valkey services to accept incoming connections, and finally code in PHP to perform a few example actions.

Instructions

Set up your PHP environment

To interact with your instance with PHP, your development environment needs to be configured with:

• A compatible version of PHP;
• A PHP client that supports Valkey and TLS, for example:
  • the phpredis extension (version 6.3.0 at the time of writing), which supports Valkey, installed with pecl install redis;
  • the Predis library (version 3.6.1 at the time of writing), a Redis/Valkey client written in PHP, installed with composer require predis/predis.

For both phpredis and Predis it is recommended to check their respective sites on how to do the install:

• phpredis official GitHub;
• Predis official GitHub.

We are now ready to learn how to connect to our instance. We will use phpredis as the PHP client.

Connect with PHP

Get the host and the port of your service in the Dashboard tab, Connection information section, as explained in the Configure incoming connections guide.

TLS is mandatory: connections without TLS are refused. With phpredis, the tls:// prefix in front of the host enables TLS. The server certificate is signed by a public certification authority: PHP verifies it by default (SSL context options verify_peer and verify_peer_name) with the CA certificates of your system, so you do not need any CA file. Do not disable this verification.

In your PHP environment, let's try a connection. To be sure that we are indeed connected, set a data pair and then check we can get the value of it. Replace <username>, <password>, <host> and <port> with your own values:

<?php
    // PHP version 8.4 used here
    echo "\nConnection to server ongoing...";
    $valkey = new Redis(); // phpredis class, compatible with Valkey

    // TLS connection to the Valkey service, with certificate verification
    $valkey->connect('tls://<host>', <port>, 2.5, '', 0, 0, [
        'stream' => ['verify_peer' => true, 'verify_peer_name' => true],
    ]);

    // Authenticate with your user
    $valkey->auth(['<username>', '<password>']);

    // Ping the instance
    echo "\nServer is running: " . var_export($valkey->ping(), true);

    // Set the key pair
    echo "\nSet key pair (cache:foo,cowabunga).";
    $valkey->set('cache:foo', 'cowabunga');

    // Get the value of the key cache:foo
    $response = $valkey->get('cache:foo');
    echo "\nGet the value for key cache:foo: ";
    echo $response;

    if ($response == "cowabunga") {
        echo "\nPHP test with Valkey OK.\n";
    } else {
        echo "\nPHP Test FAILED\n";
    }
?>

Congratulations! Everything is working properly.

If you get a NOPERM error, the permissions of your user do not allow the key or the command used. In our example, the user must be allowed to read and write keys matching cache:*. Review its keys, categories and commands in the Users tab, as explained in the Configure incoming connections guide.

Go further

• Valkey - Capabilities and Limitations
• Configuring vRack for Public Cloud

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