valkey

What is valkey?

The Valkey image packages Valkey, a community-driven fork of Redis created after Redis changed its license. Valkey preserves Redis compatibility while remaining fully open source under a permissive license, ensuring long-term availability for developers and enterprises that require a free caching and data store solution.

Valkey can be used as an in-memory database, cache, or message broker. It supports data structures like strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, and hashes, and offers replication, high availability, and clustering for horizontal scalability.

Because of its drop-in compatibility with Redis clients and libraries, Valkey is emerging as the go-to choice for organizations seeking a fully open source alternative.

How to use this image

The Valkey image can be run directly as a cache or database instance.

Examples:

<code># Run Valkey and expose port 6379
docker run -d --name valkey -p 6379:6379 valkey/valkey:latest</code>

<code># Connect to Valkey with the CLI
docker exec -it valkey valkey-cli</code>

<code># Run a simple set/get operation
valkey-cli set foo bar
valkey-cli get foo</code>

Valkey can also be deployed in Kubernetes using Helm charts or manifests, often as part of a high-availability setup with replication and clustering.

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Image variants

The Valkey image is typically published in the valkey/valkey repository with these forms:

valkey:<version>

Version-pinned images (e.g., valkey:8.0.1) are recommended for production use.

valkey:latest

Tracks the most recent stable release. Useful for testing but not ideal for production workloads.

valkey:alpine

A lightweight variant built on Alpine Linux. This reduces size and surface area, making it popular for minimal container deployments.