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Redis-based User Database Structure

We use a simple set of key-value pairs to store any individual user.

Any user has

  • an id
  • an email address
  • a role (either 'user' or 'admin')
  • a password (saved as a hash)

ID, email and role are accessible under _USERS/[id]/* and the id can be "reverse looked up" based on the email via _USER_EMAILS/[email]:

Link to

This way, it's possible to perform all CRUD user operations with four Redis commands:

  • SET [key] [value] - set or add some values
  • GET [key] - get some values
  • DEL [key] - delete values
  • KEYS [pattern] - lookup all keys that match the [pattern]
List of users

The only thing that may seem difficult with this key-value based storage, at first, is listing all users. But we can easily achieve this using the KEYS command:

const raw = await references.redisConn.client.KEYS('_USERS/*/email');

const userIds = raw.map(s => s.split('/')[1]);

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