Support node-redis alongside ioredis, now that ioredis is in maintenance mode

[DavideCarvalho]

Context

ioredis is in maintenance mode — security fixes only, no new features — and the Redis team points to node-redis as the recommended client going forward.

That framing isn't mine: RomainLanz opened boringnode/bus#41 in October with exactly that rationale.

Why this lands on @adonisjs/redis specifically

Downstream packages can add node-redis support additively, and some are already trying:

• node-redis based driver Julien-R44/bentocache#89 — "node-redis based driver"
• Migrate from ioredis to node-redis boringnode/bus#41 — migration issue, and feat(redis): add node redis transport boringnode/bus#61 — an open PR adding a node-redis transport alongside the ioredis one

But none of that reaches an AdonisJS app, because what the app hands those packages is redis.connection(name).ioConnection — an ioredis client by definition. So for as long as this package is ioredis-only, a node-redis driver downstream is unreachable from Adonis. This package is the constraint on the whole chain.

The ioredis version treadmill is already costing something

#77 is a concrete instance: 10.0.1 shipped ioredis 6 in a patch, which broke @adonisjs/cache through bentocache's cross-major instanceof check — silently connecting to 127.0.0.1:6379 instead of the configured server — and had to be reverted, with ioredis 6 re-shipped as the 11.0.0 major.

The knock-on is still live: @adonisjs/session, @adonisjs/limiter, @adonisjs/lock and @adonisjs/cache all still cap the peer at ^10, so no app can adopt @adonisjs/redis@11 without overrides.

(I've opened peer-range PRs for the first three — adonisjs/limiter#18, adonisjs/lock#4, adonisjs/session#103 — and the cache side needs Julien-R44/bentocache#123 and boringnode/bus#71 to land first. That's the short-term fix; this issue is about the longer-term direction.)

The known hard part

node-redis requires an awaited connect(), and constructors can't be async. That's what stalled the first attempt on the bus side (see elee1766's comment on boringnode/bus#41); niksy's PR works around it with lazily-created connection promises.

Whatever shape this takes here would need an answer for connection lifecycle inside a container/provider that resolves synchronously.

Proposal: additive, not a migration

Rather than replacing ioredis, add node-redis as a second connection implementation alongside it:

• existing redis.connection() / .ioConnection behaviour untouched — no breaking change
• opt-in per connection in config/redis.ts
• downstream packages that duck-type or accept a client instance can support both over time
• ioredis stays supported for as long as it needs to be

Questions

1. Is this a direction the team would consider at all, or is staying on ioredis a deliberate call?
2. If it is: an additive second implementation, or a longer-term replacement behind a compatibility layer?
3. .ioConnection is public API and widely consumed. Would a node-redis connection expose a parallel accessor, or is there appetite for a client-agnostic surface?

Happy to prototype if there's interest — I didn't want to show up with a large unsolicited PR on a core package.