Connect using Python 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: Python.

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 working Python environment

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 Python.

We will need to set up our Python environment with the valkey-py client, then code in Python to perform a few example actions.

Instructions

Set up your Python environment

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

• A compatible version of Python (valkey-py 6.1 requires Python 3.9 or later)
• valkey-py, the Python client of the Valkey project

Please follow the official valkey-py documentation to get the latest information.

Once your Python environment is set up, run python3 --version in your command line interface (CLI) to display its version, as shown below:

$ python3 --version
Python 3.12.0

In the same console, install valkey-py, then check that it is correctly installed:

$ pip install valkey
$ pip list
Package                Version
---------------------- -------
(...)
valkey                 6.1.1
(...)

We are now ready to learn how to connect to our instance!

Connect with valkey-py

Get the URI, or the host and 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. The server certificate is signed by a public certification authority, so valkey-py verifies it by default without any CA file. Do not disable this verification.

In your Python 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.

Create a valkey-connect.py file with the following content, and replace <username>, <password>, <host> and <port> with your own values. The valkeys:// scheme enables TLS:

import valkey

r = valkey.from_url("valkeys://<username>:<password>@<host>:<port>")
print(r.ping())
r.set("cache:greeting", "hello")
print(r.get("cache:greeting"))
r.delete("cache:greeting")

Run it:

$ python3 valkey-connect.py
True
b'hello'

You can also pass each parameter separately. With ssl=True, the connection uses TLS, and decode_responses=True returns strings instead of bytes:

import valkey

r = valkey.Valkey(
    host="<host>",
    port=<port>,
    username="<username>",
    password="<password>",
    ssl=True,
    decode_responses=True,
)
print(r.ping())
r.set("cache:greeting", "hello")
print(r.get("cache:greeting"))
r.delete("cache:greeting")

$ python3 valkey-connect.py
True
hello

Congratulations! Everything is working properly.

If you get a NoPermissionError (NOPERM), 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

valkey-py documentation

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