Dragonfly

What is Dragonfly?

Dragonfly is a modern, multi-threaded in-memory data store built as a drop-in replacement for Redis and Memcached, wire-compatible with both protocols but designed to make better use of multi-core machines for higher throughput.

Start Dragonfly

docker compose up -d dragonfly

Stop Dragonfly

docker compose stop dragonfly

This stops the container without deleting its data. To remove the container (data on disk is untouched, it lives under DATA_PATH_HOST): docker compose rm -f dragonfly.

Configuration

All settings live in dragonfly/defaults.env and can be overridden by adding the same line to your own .env:

Variable	Default	What it does
DRAGONFLY_VERSION	latest	Image tag from Dragonfly's registry.
DRAGONFLY_PORT	6381	Host-side port Dragonfly is published on (host:container). Deliberately not 6379, so it can run alongside redis/valkey.

The container also sets ulimits.memlock: -1, Dragonfly needs unlimited locked memory to run correctly; this is fixed in dragonfly/compose.yml and isn't user-configurable via .env.

Use Dragonfly from Laravel

Point any Redis client at it the same way you would Redis. In your Laravel .env:

REDIS_HOST=dragonfly
REDIS_PORT=6379

Note the app-side REDIS_PORT here is the container-internal port (6379), not DRAGONFLY_PORT, containers talk to each other over the internal network, not the host-published port.

Connect from your host machine

Inside Laradock, other containers reach it by container name: dragonfly:6379. From your own machine, connect to localhost:6381 (or your custom DRAGONFLY_PORT) with any Redis-compatible GUI like TablePlus or RedisInsight.

Common issues

• App can't connect but the container is running. Confirm the app's config uses dragonfly (the container name) as the host, not localhost or 127.0.0.1, those only work from your host machine, not from inside another container.
• Confusing DRAGONFLY_PORT with the internal port. DRAGONFLY_PORT (default 6381) is only the host-side mapping. From inside another container, Dragonfly is always reachable on port 6379.
• Container fails to start with a memlock-related error. Some Docker setups (notably rootless or certain CI runners) restrict ulimits.memlock; you may need to adjust your Docker daemon/host configuration since this isn't controlled from Laradock's .env.
• Port already in use on your host. Another local Dragonfly (or another Laradock project) is already bound to 6381. Change DRAGONFLY_PORT in .env and restart: docker compose up -d dragonfly.

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Prefer upstream Redis instead? See Redis. Want the community Redis fork? See Valkey. New to Laradock? Start at Getting Started.