Setting Up a Local Redis Tunnel to GCP

This guide will help you connect to a Redis instance running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using SSH tunneling.

Start the VM in Compute Engine:

gcloud compute instances start redis-tunnel-vm --project=<PROJECT_ID> --zone=<ZONE>

Start the GCP tunnel VM

gcloud compute instances start redis-tunnel-vm --project=<PROJECT_ID> --zone=<ZONE>

SSH into the GCP VM instance where your Redis server is running. You can do this via the GCP Console or using the gcloud command-line tool.

gcloud compute ssh redis-tunnel-vm --project=<PROJECT_ID> --zone=<ZONE> --ssh-flag="-N -L <REDIS_IP>:6379"

(Not needed if you don't need to connect to the local app) Run the app locally, ensuring it connects to Redis at localhost:6379.

$env:REDIS_HOST="localhost"; $env:REDIS_PORT="6379"; npm run dev

Run redis-cli in docker to see what's inside your GCP Redis instance:

docker run -it --rm redis redis-cli -h host.docker.internal -p 6379

Stop the GCP VM instance when done:

gcloud compute instances stop redis-tunnel-vm --project=<PROJECT_ID> --zone=<ZONE>

See all keys in the Redis instance

KEYS *

Delete a key to invalidate cache:

del mykey

Inspecting Specific Values

Once you have the name of a key from the previous step, you need to "peek" inside it. The command depends on the type of data.

Check the type first:

TYPE [your_key_name]

If the type is "string":

GET [your_key_name]

If the type is "hash" (common for objects/user profiles):

HGETALL [your_key_name]

If the type is "list":

LRANGE [your_key_name] 0 -1