How to Use Redis with NestJS A Simple Guide to Caching

A guide to integrating Redis with NestJS using ioredis directly, with a RedisModule/RedisService pattern and a real-world caching case study.

Key takeaways

• Uses direct ioredis instantiation with OnModuleInit/OnModuleDestroy lifecycle hooks for connection management
• Implements standard set/get/delete methods with TTL support via EX option
• Real-world case study: A D2C brand crashed during a sale because hero product queries overwhelmed the database. Caching product data in Redis with 30-minute TTL reduced DB queries by 90% (from hundreds of thousands to a few hundred per day).
• Demonstrates the Cache-aside Pattern: check cache first, query DB on miss, populate cache with TTL

Entities and concepts

• Redis
• ioredis
• NestJS
• Cache-aside Pattern

Connections to existing knowledge

This article follows the same manual ioredis pattern as Using Redis Client in NestJS but is simpler (no repository layer or FactoryProvider). It provides the strongest real-world evidence for Redis caching impact — a 90% query reduction that prevented a full database scale-up. Contrasts with the CacheModule/CacheInterceptor approach in How to add Redis cache to a NestJS app.