Umbraco 10 - Azure Cache for Redis

I've recently needed to use Azure Cache for Redis on an Umbraco 9 website for user sessions to store information.

After some research, I went with the following approach:

Install Nuget Package

Install the following nuget package from Microsoft:

Install-Package Microsoft.Extensions.Caching.StackExchangeRedis

Create an "AzureCacheConfig" Model

Create a configuration model, so I can bind to my appsettings section:

public class AzureCacheConfig
{
    public string ConnectionString { get; set; } 
    public string InstanceName {get; set; }
}

Add settings into appsettings.json

Add the following into my appsettings.json and replace the ConnectionString value with my secret one from Azure:

"AzureCache": {
    "ConnectionString": "XXXX.redis.cache.windows.net:YYYY,password=ZZZZ,ssl=True,abortConnect=False",
    "InstanceName": "Session_"
  }

You can get your ConnectionString for "Azure Cache for Redis", within the Azure Portal.

example:

Add Redis to Startup.cs

Then within the Startup.cs file found in the root of the web project, add the following code under ConfigureServices method above the services.AddUmbraco() line:

services.AddStackExchangeRedisCache(o =>
{
    AzureCacheConfig azureCacheConfig = new();
    _config.GetSection("AzureCache").Bind(azureCacheConfig);

    if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(azureCacheConfig.ConnectionString))
        o.Configuration = azureCacheConfig.ConnectionString;

    if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(azureCacheConfig.InstanceName))
        o.InstanceName = azureCacheConfig.InstanceName;
});

For the basic setup, that's it!

Restart your application and now Umbraco will be Redis for user sessions.

This only works for IDistributedCache, which I believe Umbraco doesn't use for the backoffice. However user sessions will now be scalable through Redis, which is what's needed on a scalable frontend solution.

A handy tool that I used to view my Redis cache keys to make sure it was working correct: RedisInsight-v2

If you need any help, give me a shout on twitter