HELLO

Switch to a different protocol, optionally authenticating and setting the connection's name, or provide a contextual client report.

Valkey supports two protocols: RESP2 and RESP3. RESP3 has certain advantages since when the connection is in this mode, Valkey is able to reply with more semantical replies: for instance, HGETALL will return a map type, so a client library implementation no longer requires to know in advance to translate the array into a hash before returning it to the caller. For a full coverage of RESP3, please check the RESP3 specification.

Valkey connections start in RESP2 mode, so clients implementing RESP2 do not need to updated or changed. There are no short term plans to drop support for RESP2, although future version may default to RESP3.

HELLO always replies with a list of current server and connection properties, such as: versions, modules loaded, client ID, replication role and so forth. When called without any arguments and its default use of RESP2 protocol, the reply looks like this:

> HELLO
 1) "server"
 2) "redis"
 3) "version"
 4) "255.255.255"
 5) "proto"
 6) (integer) 2
 7) "id"
 8) (integer) 5
 9) "mode"
10) "standalone"
11) "role"
12) "master"
13) "modules"
14) (empty array)

Clients that want to handshake using the RESP3 mode need to call the HELLO command and specify the value "3" as the protover argument, like so:

> HELLO 3
1# "server" => "redis"
2# "version" => "7.2.4"
3# "proto" => (integer) 3
4# "id" => (integer) 10
5# "mode" => "standalone"
6# "role" => "master"
7# "modules" => (empty array)

Because HELLO replies with useful information, and given that protover is optional or can be set to "2", client library authors may consider using this command instead of the canonical PING when setting up the connection.

When called with the optional protover argument, this command switches the protocol to the specified version and also accepts the following options:

• AUTH <username> <password>: directly authenticate the connection in addition to switching to the specified protocol version. This makes calling AUTH before HELLO unnecessary when setting up a new connection. Note that the username can be set to "default" to authenticate against a server that does not use ACLs, but rather the simpler requirepass mechanism.
• SETNAME <clientname>: this is the equivalent of calling CLIENT SETNAME.

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