The ln-history platform provides the feature to get live data from multiple nodes. This is particularly interesting when analyzing how fast and complete gossip messages get propergated through the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

To store this (temporary) data and check for duplicates quickly we use a redis-fork valkey cache.

#Why valkey and not redis?

After reading this interesting story about licensing changes made by redis, valkey forked away as a truely free and open source alternative. It is backend by the e. g. Linux foundation.

#Setup

We will start by setting up the directory structure and continue with the docker container

#Create directory

From the project root we create the cache directory with the following command.

#Environment variablesauthentication

Create an .env file and fill in a securely created password.

VALKEY_PASSWORD=YOUR_SECURLY_GENERATED_PASSWORD

🔐 Important: Never commit .env files containing credentials to version control.

#🐳 Docker container

Create the docker-compose.yml and paste the following content into it.

services:
  valkey:
    image: valkey/valkey:8.1
    container_name: valkey
    ports:
     - "6379:6379"
    volumes:
      - valkey-data:/data
    restart: unless-stopped
    env_file: .env
    command: ["valkey-server", "--appendonly", "yes", "--requirepass", "${VALKEY_PASSWORD}"]

volumes:
  valkey-data:

#Folder structure

Ultimatly the folder structure should look like this:

cache/
├── .env                    # Environment variables for the service
└── docker-compose.yml      # Docker setup for this service

#Run

We start the container by using docker compose up -d (The flag -d abbreviates deamon, meaning background process).

#Verify

See the logs of the docker container.