Starting Redis as a service on OS X with Homebrew

I installed Redis via brew install redis and attempted to add it as a service via:

ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/redis/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.redis.plist

These didn't generate any errors; however, it appears that Redis does not start. If I run redis-cli ping, I get back Could not connect to Redis at 127.0.0.1:6379: Connection refused.

I can manually run redis-server in another terminal window, but I'd like to have Redis auto-start on login.

I also tried uninstalling Redis, reinstalling it, and using brew services to manage services (brew services works fine for me with the installations of MongoDB and Cassandra).

I haven't seen others having this problem so I'm not sure how to diagnose. If anyone has any advice, much appreciated!

make sure you've tapped the services first:

brew tap homebrew/services

then try:

brew services [start/stop/restart] redis

you can also start and stop redis with:

sudo launchctl start io.redis.redis-server

sudo launchctl stop io.redis.redis-server

to make your life easier, you can add aliases for these commands to your .bash_profile.

alias redisstart='sudo launchctl start io.redis.redis-server'
alias redisstop='sudo launchctl stop io.redis.redis-server'

then you can just start and stop redis by typing redisstart and redisstop.

another way you can go about this is adding redis as a background service:

sudo vim /Library/LaunchDaemons/io.redis.redis-server.plist

then copy and paste the following into the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>io.redis.redis-server</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/usr/local/bin/redis-server</string>
        <string>/usr/local/etc/redis.conf</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.redis.plist

You may have edited the conf file to daemonize redis when you used to start redis manually before. Check it and change daemonize to no, then retry brew services