Redis key prefix should be configurable

[multani]

Currently, the RedisNamespaceManager prefixes all the keys with beaker_cache:.

This should be a configurable parameter of the namespace manager, that would allow to use different instances of Beaker with different applications, without having to specify different databases. This may also help to distinguish "owners" of the keys, as instead of having beaker_cache has a prefix, it would be possible to put a more "application friendly" name.

If not specified, the default value should stay with beaker_cache.

[multani]

If this feature is willing to be accepted, I'd be glad to propose a pull request to support that use case :+1:

[amol-]

Is the purpose of this to allow multiple applications with same namespace and same key to store in the same redis? I'm only concerned about consistency with the other namespace managers. Most of them don't allow to configure the prefix as it's an internal implementation detail.

[multani]

@amol- Basically, yes the purpose is to have different applications using Beaker and the same namespaces/keys without conflicting with each other.

We also have a "monitoring" aspects, in the sense that we have some scripts running which are computing resource usage based on this initial prefix. We have other frameworks/languages using Redis and we configured them to store the "application name" (or something equivalent) as the initial key prefix ... which works well for our use cases, except for our Python applications which are all grouped under the same prefix. (I know it's probably better to use different Redis servers/databases to separate application concerns, but that may not be always possible for various reasons).

As for your concern regarding the other managers, I don't see it as a particular problem:

• This initial prefix is already configured - hard-coded - and different from some of the other namespace managers (it's not in the Memcache manager for example)
• Some managers apparently already support this prefix to be configurable. I haven't look in details, but it looks like:
  • the database's table_name can be changed
  • the Google App Engine's table_name can be changed
  • MongoDB doesn't have a dedicated prefix (?)
  • The file manager's directories can be configured
  • etc.
• Ultimately, it's another manager-specific configuration detail, much the same as Redis needs a hostname, port, database "name", etc. Once configured, it would replace the current hard-coded value and would be transparent.