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

Laradock CLI

./laradock start dragonfly

Docker Compose

docker compose up -d dragonfly

Name any other services alongside it to start them together, for example ./laradock start dragonfly workspace.

Stop Dragonfly

Stopping just pauses the container; your data is safe:

Laradock CLI

./laradock stop dragonfly

Docker Compose

docker compose stop dragonfly

To delete the container entirely (the data on disk is still untouched, it lives under DATA_PATH_HOST):

Laradock CLI

./laradock remove dragonfly

Docker Compose

docker compose rm -sf 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 with the CLI client

Dragonfly speaks the Redis protocol, so redis-cli (bundled in the image) works against it directly:

Laradock CLI

./laradock enter dragonfly
redis-cli

Docker Compose

docker compose exec dragonfly bash
redis-cli

From your host machine instead, point any Redis GUI (RedisInsight, TablePlus) or the redis-cli binary at localhost:6381 (or your custom DRAGONFLY_PORT).

Check memory usage and stats

From inside redis-cli:

INFO memory
DBSIZE
MEMORY USAGE <key>

INFO memory reports overall memory consumption, DBSIZE counts how many keys are stored, and MEMORY USAGE <key> sizes a single key, all standard Redis commands Dragonfly implements natively.

Flush all data

To wipe every key without stopping the container (⚠️ this permanently deletes everything in the current database, there is no undo):

FLUSHALL

Run it from inside redis-cli (see Connect with the CLI client above), or non-interactively:

Laradock CLI

./laradock exec dragonfly redis-cli FLUSHALL

Docker Compose

docker compose exec dragonfly redis-cli FLUSHALL

Start completely fresh (wipe all data on disk)

FLUSHALL clears keys in a running instance; to also remove the container and its on-disk snapshot and start from a totally clean state:

Laradock CLI

./laradock stop dragonfly
./laradock remove dragonfly
rm -rf "${DATA_PATH_HOST:-~/.laradock/data}/dragonfly"
./laradock start dragonfly

Docker Compose

docker compose stop dragonfly
docker compose rm -sf dragonfly
rm -rf "${DATA_PATH_HOST:-~/.laradock/data}/dragonfly"
docker compose up -d dragonfly

DATA_PATH_HOST is whatever you have set in .env (~/.laradock/data by default), so the folder above is where Dragonfly's data actually lives on your machine (mounted to /data in the container).

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: ./laradock restart dragonfly.
• Memory keeps growing. Dragonfly (like Redis) keeps everything in RAM. Check usage with INFO memory, and consider FLUSHALL or a fresh start above if a dev/test workload has filled it up with stale keys.

---

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