Using Redis and Node-js to generate Temporary-Invite Codes at Scale.

Gaurav Agrawal

2 min readApr 23, 2022

Credits: https://unsplash.com/photos/cixohzDpNIo

Process

Step 1: (Connect Redis)

Connect the Redis client to your node application.

Step 2: (Generate Invite-code)

Generate a random string of alphanumeric characters.

Step 3: (Making sure the Invite-code is unused)

Check if generated invite code already exists in the key-value store, if exists then retry till you manage to find a new one.

Note: This retrial will almost never run infinite and is not a computationally heavy process. Reason being the invite-code in key-value stores are short lived and we have a wide range of combinations to iterate upon.

Step 4: (Store Invite Code in Redis)

Store invite-code (key) and resource-id as value in Redis key-value store.

Step 5: (Accepting Invite Code)

Perform a get operation with invite-code as value. If the value exists then use the resource-id and one can explicitly clear the invite code using del in redis-store (depending on the use case of single use-invite code), otherwise redis will anyways be clearing up the key post the expire-timeoutthe value used by the set operation.

Code

Why Redis Helps In Scale for this use-case ?

Key-value in memory reads and writes are super fast in redis-store.
For the invite-code use case, using redis key-value store helps in faster unique checks and retrievals.
Redis set expire timeout feature is reliable and fast for implicit invite code expiry.
Retrial mechanism benefits a lot from near milliseconds retrievals from Redis’s key value stores.

Useful Readings:

GET

Get the value of key. If the key does not exist the special value nil is returned. An error is returned if the value…

redis.io

Redis FAQ

Commonly asked questions when getting started with Redis Redis has a different evolution path in the key-value DBs…