SSL/TLS is supported by Valkey as an optional feature that needs to be enabled at compile time.
Getting Started
Building
To build with TLS support you'll need OpenSSL development libraries (e.g.
libssl-dev
on Debian/Ubuntu).
Build Valkey with the following command:
make BUILD_TLS=yes
Tests
To run Valkey test suite with TLS, you'll need TLS support for TCL (i.e.
tcl-tls
package on Debian/Ubuntu).
-
Run
./utils/gen-test-certs.sh
to generate a root CA and a server certificate. -
Run
./runtest --tls
or./runtest-cluster --tls
to run Valkey and Valkey Cluster tests in TLS mode.
Running manually
To manually run a Valkey server with TLS mode (assuming gen-test-certs.sh
was
invoked so sample certificates/keys are available):
./src/valkey-server --tls-port 6379 --port 0 \
--tls-cert-file ./tests/tls/valkey.crt \
--tls-key-file ./tests/tls/valkey.key \
--tls-ca-cert-file ./tests/tls/ca.crt
To connect to this Valkey server with valkey-cli
:
./src/valkey-cli --tls \
--cert ./tests/tls/valkey.crt \
--key ./tests/tls/valkey.key \
--cacert ./tests/tls/ca.crt
Certificate configuration
In order to support TLS, Valkey must be configured with a X.509 certificate and a private key. In addition, it is necessary to specify a CA certificate bundle file or path to be used as a trusted root when validating certificates. To support DH based ciphers, a DH params file can also be configured. For example:
tls-cert-file /path/to/valkey.crt
tls-key-file /path/to/valkey.key
tls-ca-cert-file /path/to/ca.crt
tls-dh-params-file /path/to/valkey.dh
TLS listening port
The tls-port
configuration directive enables accepting SSL/TLS connections on
the specified port. This is in addition to listening on port
for TCP
connections, so it is possible to access Valkey on different ports using TLS and
non-TLS connections simultaneously.
You may specify port 0
to disable the non-TLS port completely. To enable only
TLS on the default Valkey port, use:
port 0
tls-port 6379
Client certificate authentication
By default, Valkey uses mutual TLS and requires clients to authenticate with a
valid certificate (authenticated against trusted root CAs specified by
ca-cert-file
or ca-cert-dir
).
You may use tls-auth-clients no
to disable client authentication.
Replication
A Valkey master server handles connecting clients and replica servers in the same
way, so the above tls-port
and tls-auth-clients
directives apply to
replication links as well.
On the replica server side, it is necessary to specify tls-replication yes
to
use TLS for outgoing connections to the master.
Cluster
When Valkey Cluster is used, use tls-cluster yes
in order to enable TLS for the
cluster bus and cross-node connections.
Sentinel
Sentinel inherits its networking configuration from the common Valkey configuration, so all of the above applies to Sentinel as well.
When connecting to master servers, Sentinel will use the tls-replication
directive to determine if a TLS or non-TLS connection is required.
In addition, the very same tls-replication
directive will determine whether Sentinel's
port, that accepts connections from other Sentinels, will support TLS as well. That is,
Sentinel will be configured with tls-port
if and only if tls-replication
is enabled.
Additional configuration
Additional TLS configuration is available to control the choice of TLS protocol
versions, ciphers and cipher suites, etc. Please consult the self documented
valkey.conf
for more information.
Performance considerations
TLS adds a layer to the communication stack with overheads due to writing/reading to/from an SSL connection, encryption/decryption and integrity checks. Consequently, using TLS results in a decrease of the achievable throughput per Valkey instance.
Limitations
I/O threading is currently not supported with TLS.