Redis as message broker in Django - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Redis as message broker

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple Django app that uses Redis as a message broker to send and receive messages between parts of your app.This is like a post office where one part sends letters (messages) and another part picks them up.

🎯 Goal: Create a Django setup that connects to Redis, sends a message to a Redis channel, and listens for messages from that channel.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Redis connection in Django

Set a Redis channel name as a configuration variable

Write a function to publish a message to the Redis channel

Write a function to subscribe and listen to messages from the Redis channel

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Redis is often used as a fast message broker to connect different parts of web apps or microservices.

💼 Career

Understanding Redis messaging helps in building scalable, real-time Django applications and working with modern backend architectures.

1

Setup Redis connection

Create a Redis connection called redis_client using redis.Redis() with host='localhost' and port=6379.

Django

# Create Redis connection
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use redis.Redis(host='localhost', port=6379) to connect to Redis server.

2

Set Redis channel name

Create a variable called CHANNEL_NAME and set it to the string 'my_channel'.

Django

import redis

redis_client = redis.Redis(host='localhost', port=6379)

# Set Redis channel name
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the string 'my_channel' to CHANNEL_NAME.

3

Publish message function

Write a function called publish_message that takes a message parameter and publishes it to CHANNEL_NAME using redis_client.publish().

Django

import redis

redis_client = redis.Redis(host='localhost', port=6379)

CHANNEL_NAME = 'my_channel'

def publish_message(message):
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use redis_client.publish(CHANNEL_NAME, message) inside the function.

4

Subscribe and listen function

Write a function called subscribe_and_listen that subscribes to CHANNEL_NAME using redis_client.pubsub(), listens for messages in a loop, and prints the message data when received.

Django

import redis

redis_client = redis.Redis(host='localhost', port=6379)

CHANNEL_NAME = 'my_channel'

def publish_message(message):
    redis_client.publish(CHANNEL_NAME, message)

# Write subscribe_and_listen function
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use redis_client.pubsub() to create a subscriber, subscribe to CHANNEL_NAME, then loop over pubsub.listen() to get messages.