Replace Redis with Valkey on EL 9/10

After Redis moved away from its open-source license in 2024, Enterprise Linux adopted Valkey, the Linux Foundation fork, as the in-distribution replacement. RHEL 10 ships Valkey instead of Redis, and RHEL 9 carries it in AppStream alongside the final open-source Redis. Valkey 8 speaks the same protocol (RESP), reads the same dump.rdb files, and existing Redis client libraries connect to it unmodified.

This recipe installs Valkey, carries data over from a running Redis instance, and verifies persistence survives a restart.

Prerequisites

• AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux or RHEL 9/10 with root or sudo access.
• If migrating: an existing Redis 6/7 instance whose data you want to keep. New installs can skip step 3.

1. Install Valkey

Valkey lives in AppStream, the distribution's own repository, so no extra repos are needed:

sudo dnf install valkey

2. Configure

The configuration file is /etc/valkey/valkey.conf and uses the same directives as redis.conf. The packaged defaults already bind to 127.0.0.1 only. For a typical cache/session store, set a memory ceiling and an eviction policy by appending to the config — in this format the last occurrence of a directive wins, and dnf treats the file as noreplace, so your tuning survives package updates:

sudo tee -a /etc/valkey/valkey.conf > /dev/null <<'EOF'

# --- local tuning ---
maxmemory 256mb
maxmemory-policy allkeys-lru
EOF

(The EL package has no conf.d include directory; the appended block plays that role.)

If anything other than localhost must connect, set requirepass (or ACLs) before changing bind — never expose an unauthenticated instance to a network.

3. Migrate data from Redis (optional)

Valkey 8 reads Redis RDB dumps directly. Stop the old service so the dump is consistent, copy it into Valkey's data directory, and fix ownership:

sudo systemctl stop redis
sudo cp /var/lib/redis/dump.rdb /var/lib/valkey/dump.rdb
sudo chown valkey:valkey /var/lib/valkey/dump.rdb

If your Redis used AOF persistence (appendonly yes), either trigger a final RDB snapshot first (redis-cli save), or copy the appendonlydir/ across and enable appendonly yes in a Valkey drop-in too.

4. Start and enable

sudo systemctl enable --now valkey

Verify

The client tool is valkey-cli; it speaks to anything RESP-compatible:

valkey-cli ping
valkey-cli set cookbook:test "epel.cloud"
valkey-cli get cookbook:test

Expected:

PONG
OK
"epel.cloud"

Confirm the data survives a service restart (this proves persistence is actually configured, not assumed):

sudo systemctl restart valkey
valkey-cli get cookbook:test

Expected: "epel.cloud" again. If you migrated from Redis, spot-check a few known keys the same way, and compare key counts with valkey-cli dbsize against the old instance's redis-cli dbsize. Confirm the tuning took:

valkey-cli config get maxmemory-policy

Expected:

1) "maxmemory-policy"
2) "allkeys-lru"

Your applications keep using their existing Redis client libraries and connection URLs; only the port's listener changed. If an app hardcodes the redis-cli binary, note that Valkey ships valkey-cli instead.

Recovery

The old Redis instance and its data are untouched by this recipe: stopping Valkey and starting Redis again (sudo systemctl disable --now valkey && sudo systemctl start redis) is a full rollback, as long as you have not written new data you need into Valkey in the meantime. Writes made only to Valkey after the cutover do not flow back to Redis.

Notes

• RHEL 9 keeps Redis 7.2 (the last open-source release) in AppStream through the EL 9 lifecycle, so this migration is about staying on a maintained upstream, not an emergency.
• On EL 10 there is no redis package; valkey is the path.
• Valkey honors maxmemory-policy exactly as Redis does; the Valkey docs cover the policy options.