When I attended Open Source Bridge two weeks ago, I wanted something to hack on while I was there. The upcoming version of Kiln moves from relying on a combination of explicit threads and FogBugz’ heartbeat mechanism to using a very lightweight queuing system backed by Redis. The only problem is that Redis doesn’t run on Windows, and while that’s not a problem for Kiln On Demand, where we rely heavily on FreeBSD for key parts of Kiln’s infrastructure, the licensed version Kiln needs to run on pure Windows systems.

To fix that, I’m happy to announce Miniredis, a tiny, crappy, pure Python clone of exactly the features in Redis that Kiln’s queuing system needs in order to work properly for an on-site Windows—and no others. Say goodbye to TTLs, append-only storage, about 3/4ths of Redis’ command set, and servicing multiple requests simultaneously. But say hello to a quick and dirty way to test and debug a Redis client on a Windows system if you don’t have a Unix VM handy—or, like us, you want to do a really lightweight queuing system or similar where you don’t expect to have a lot of Redis-oriented activity at any given point.

In the long term, I suspect that Redis will be ported to Windows, making Miniredis’ existence meaningless. If not, maybe some intrepid soul will take the time to add the rest of Redis’ command set (which should actually be easy; just time-consuming). But for now, hopefully you can find a use for it.