Simple hit counter with a Redis backend

One simple example to show the ease of extendibility of OpenResty is with a basic hit counter. Taking it a step further, we're going to use a Redis backend so that the counter is both persistent and could also be part of a clustered deployment to give a combined hit counter. This will also introduce you to the basics of how OpenResty can directly talk to many other services outside of the basic proxying of connections or via FPM.

In a deployment where every bit of optimization possible is critical, this could also be used to retrieve cached data direct from Redis, allowing the application servers to simply write cache data to Redis in an asynchronized manner.

Getting ready

We'll need access to a Redis daemon or cluster from this server. This could be in the form of a full cluster or you can simply have Redis installed alongside OpenResty on the same server.

How to do it...

To implement our simple hit counter, we're going to add a basic location block directive...