Quickstart

Start pace-kv and round-trip a value with the client that ships beside it.

1. Run the daemon

./pace-kv

It listens on 127.0.0.1:6674 — pace-kv's own port. The number selects no protocol: everything below reaches the same daemon on the same port, because the wire format is detected per connection.

2. Store and fetch a value

pacectl is the first-party client — see pacectl for the full reference:

$ pacectl set greeting hello --ttl 60s
$ pacectl get greeting
hello
$ pacectl ttl greeting
key     greeting
exists  true
ttl     59
$ pacectl del greeting
1

A verb that only succeeds or fails prints nothing and says so through its exit status; one that answers a question prints the answer, and one that answers several prints a two-column record.

A miss exits 1, a daemon that cannot be reached exits 3, and a usage mistake exits 2 — so a shell script can tell those three apart:

$ pacectl get nothing-here; echo "exit=$?"
exit=1

3. Ask it for stats

Human-readable by default, machine-readable on request:

$ pacectl stats
source                    info
pace_version        pace-0.2.0
used_memory               94
maxmemory                 8589934592
total_commands_processed  6
...
$ pacectl stats --format=json
{"source":"info","pace_version":"pace-0.2.0","used_memory":94,...}
$ pacectl stats --format=tsv

The first field is the source, because the sources differ enormously in richness and a number means little without knowing which answered. RESP INFO carries 8 fields; the daemon's /metrics endpoint carries over a hundred. Start the daemon with --metrics and the same command reports source metrics and far more of them.

4. Speak the protocols by hand

The wire formats are still plain text, which is useful when you are debugging the protocols themselves rather than the cache.

The ASCII text protocol over telnet:

$ telnet 127.0.0.1 6674
> set greeting 0 60 5
> hello
< STORED
> get greeting
< VALUE greeting 0 5
< hello
< END
> quit

The same connection accepts the modern meta commands:

> mg greeting v
< VA 5
< hello
> ms counter 1 T60
> 0
< HD
> ma counter v
< VA 1
< 1

And the Redis handler answers redis-cli on the same port:

$ redis-cli -p 6674
127.0.0.1:6674> SET greeting hello EX 60
OK
127.0.0.1:6674> GET greeting
"hello"

See Protocols overview for the auto-detection rules, and Redis RESP for which Redis commands are answered.