Redis Patterns for Node.js: Caching, Pub/Sub, and Rate Limiting in Production

Redis Patterns for Node.js: Caching, Pub/Sub, and Rate Limiting in Production Redis is the Swiss Army knife of backend infrastructure. It's fast, versatile, and battle-tested — but using it well in production requires more than slapping a SET and GET around your database calls. In this guide, we'll walk through five patterns that appear repeatedly in production Node.js systems, each with working code, error handling, and the gotchas that only emerge after things have broken. All examples use ioredis, the de facto Node.js Redis client with solid cluster support, TLS, and built-in retry logic. Prerequisites and Setup npm install ioredis Throughout this article we'll share a Redis client instance. In production you'd inject this via dependency injection or a module singleton: // redis.js const Redis = require('ioredis'); const redis = new Redis({ host: process.env.REDIS_HOST || '127.0.0.1', port: parseInt(process.env.REDIS_PORT || '6379'), password: process.env.REDIS_PASSWORD, maxRetriesP