CLIENT KILL

The CLIENT KILL command closes a given client connection. This command support two formats, the old format:

CLIENT KILL addr:port

The ip:port should match a line returned by the CLIENT LIST command (addr field).

The new format:

CLIENT KILL <filter> <value> ... ... <filter> <value>

With the new form it is possible to kill clients by different attributes instead of killing just by address. The following filters are available:

• CLIENT KILL ADDR ip:port. This is exactly the same as the old three-arguments behavior.
• CLIENT KILL LADDR ip:port. Kill all clients connected to specified local (bind) address.
• CLIENT KILL ID client-id. Allows to kill a client by its unique ID field. Client ID's are retrieved using the CLIENT LIST command.
• CLIENT KILL TYPE type, where type is one of normal, master, replica and pubsub. This closes the connections of all the clients in the specified class. Note that clients blocked into the MONITOR command are considered to belong to the normal class.
• CLIENT KILL USER username. Closes all the connections that are authenticated with the specified ACL username, however it returns an error if the username does not map to an existing ACL user.
• CLIENT KILL SKIPME yes/no. By default this option is set to yes, that is, the client calling the command will not get killed, however setting this option to no will have the effect of also killing the client calling the command.
• CLIENT KILL MAXAGE maxage. Closes all the connections that are older than the specified age, in seconds.

It is possible to provide multiple filters at the same time. The command will handle multiple filters via logical AND. For example:

CLIENT KILL addr 127.0.0.1:12345 type pubsub

is valid and will kill only a pubsub client with the specified address. This format containing multiple filters is rarely useful currently.

When the new form is used the command no longer returns OK or an error, but instead the number of killed clients, that may be zero.

CLIENT KILL and Valkey Sentinel

Valkey Sentinel uses CLIENT KILL to terminate client connections when an instance is reconfigured. This mechanism ensures that clients re-establish a connection with a Sentinel, refreshing their configurations.

Notes

Due to the single-threaded nature of Valkey, it is not possible to kill a client connection while it is executing a command. From the client point of view, the connection can never be closed in the middle of the execution of a command. However, the client will notice the connection has been closed only when the next command is sent (and results in network error).

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