ioredis author @Luin said that his ioredis surpassed redis to become the most popular Redis client for Node.js, and this milestone took a full 7 years.

ioredis is a Redis client for Node.js that is robust, performant, powerful and comprehensive.

@Luin gave some background, here is a quote from him:

At the end of 2014 I started developing backend programs using Node.js. In order to connect to Redis, I studied the Redis client library on the market. The most popular library at the time, redis, was developed by Matt Ranney, chief architect at Uber. After using it, I found that this library has some things that I am not satisfied with:

1. Promises are not supported (promises were a very new concept at the time)
2. The command syntax is not very pretty (personal aesthetic differences 😄)
3. Incomplete functions: lack of support for new Redis functions such as Cluster and Sentinel.

Since I had some spare time at the time, I developed and open sourced ioredis from scratch. It has been maintained for 7 years now. During these 7 years, another library, redis, has gone through the process of changing the main maintainer many times, planning to merge with ioredis, and finally being officially acquired by Redis. It’s interesting to compare the two.