When developing, you sometimes want to delete a bunch of redis keys all at once. The KEYS command gets half of the job done, but what’s missing is a convenient way to wire it to the DEL command.

In these cases, (again, when developing, as the KEYS command is check-all-keys-in-database-slow) I often rely on this script:

#!/bin/bash
#
# A simple script to delete a bunch of keys from redis all at once.
#
# Don't use it in production!!!1!1!one

read -p "redis port to connect to? [6379] " redis_port

if [[ "${redis_port}" == "" ]]; then
    redis_port="6379"
fi

if [[ ${redis_port} =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
    while true; do
        read -p "keys to delete (wildcard accepted, e.g. user:foo:bar:*): " pattern
        # read all keys into a white space separated array
        IFS=$'\r\n' GLOBIGNORE='*' :; matches=($(redis-cli --raw -p ${redis_port} keys "${pattern}"))

        # list all matches
        echo "Matching keys:"
        matching_keys=0
        for line in ${matches[@]}; do
            echo $line
            matching_keys=$((matching_keys+1))
        done

        if [[ "${matching_keys}" -eq 0 ]]; then
            echo "No keys match your query, nothing to do."
        else
            read -p "Keys that will be deleted: ${matching_keys}. Really delete? [y/N] " confirm
            case ${confirm} in
                [yY]*)
                    echo -n "Keys deleted: "
                    redis-cli --raw -p ${redis_port} del "${matches[@]}"
                    ;;
            esac
        fi
    done
else
    echo 'must specify a valid port number'
    exit 1
fi

The nice thing about it is that it shows you what keys will be deleted before deleting them, so you have a chance of not screwing up your own DB! 🙂

Use it at will, but please, don’t use it in production!

Usage is straightforward, just chmod +x the script, and call it. Use Ctrl-C to exit the script.