Using redis with heroku - heroku

Question

This is my first time using redis and the only reason I am is because I'm trying out autocomplete search tutorial. The tutorial works perfectly in development but I'm having trouble setting up redis for heroku.
I already followed these steps on the heroku docs for setting up redis but when I run heroku run rake db:seed I get Redis::CannotConnectError: Error connecting to Redis on 127.0.0.1:6379 (Errno::ECONNREFUSED)
I'm not very familiar with heroku so if you guys need any more information let me know.
Edit
I've completed the initializer steps shown here and when I run heroku config:get REDISCLOUD_URL the result is exactly the same as the Redis Cloud URL under the config vars section of my Heroku settings.
Following the documentation, I then set up config/initializers/redis.rb like so:
if ENV["REDISCLOUD_URL"]
$redis = Redis.new(:url => ENV["REDISCLOUD_URL"])
end
Just to check, I tried substituting the actual URL for redis cloud inside the if block instead of just the REDISCLOUD_URL variable but that didn't work. My error message hasn't changed when I try to seed the heroku db.

Answer 1

It’s not enough to just create a $redis variable that points to the installed Redis server, you also need to tell Soulmate about it, otherwise it will default to localhost.
From the Soulmate README you should be able to do something like this in an initializer (instead of your current redis.rb initializer, which you won’t need unless you are using Redis somewhere else in your app):
if ENV["REDISCLOUD_URL"]
Soulmate.redis = ENV["REDISCLOUD_URL"]
end
Looking at the Soulmate source, an easier way may be to set the REDIS_URL environment variable to the Redis url, either instead of or as well as REDISCLOUD_URL, as it looks like Soulmate checks this before falling back to localhost.

Answer 2

Your code is trying to connect to a local Redis instance, instead the one from Redis Cloud - make sure you've completed the initializer step as detailed in order to resolve this.