Migration Guide

From Django's Built-in Cache Backend

# Before (Django's Redis backend)
"BACKEND": "django.core.cache.backends.redis.RedisCache"

# After (Valkey)
"BACKEND": "django_cachex.cache.ValkeyCache"

# Or (Redis)
"BACKEND": "django_cachex.cache.RedisCache"

All Django options work unchanged. You gain extended features (data structures, TTL ops, locking, compression, unified Valkey/Redis support).

From django-valkey

# Before
"BACKEND": "django_valkey.cache.ValkeyCache"
"OPTIONS": {"CLIENT_CLASS": "django_valkey.client.DefaultClient"}

# After
"BACKEND": "django_cachex.cache.ValkeyCache"

Key changes:

django-valkey	django-cachex
CLIENT_CLASS	Removed - use specific backend class
SERIALIZER	serializer (lowercase)
COMPRESSOR	compressor (lowercase)
CONNECTION_POOL_CLASS	pool_class
get_valkey_connection()	cache.get_client()

Import paths: django_valkey.* → django_cachex.*

For Sentinel: Use django_cachex.cache.RedisSentinelCache (or ValkeySentinelCache) instead of CLIENT_CLASS.

From django-redis

# Before
"BACKEND": "django_redis.cache.RedisCache"
"OPTIONS": {"CLIENT_CLASS": "django_redis.client.DefaultClient"}

# After
"BACKEND": "django_cachex.cache.RedisCache"

Key changes:

django-redis	django-cachex
CLIENT_CLASS	Removed - use specific backend class
SERIALIZER	serializer (lowercase)
COMPRESSOR	compressor (lowercase)
CONNECTION_POOL_CLASS	pool_class
get_redis_connection()	cache.get_client()

Import paths: django_redis.* → django_cachex.*

For Sentinel: Use django_cachex.cache.RedisSentinelCache instead of CLIENT_CLASS.

New Features

After migrating, you gain:

• Unified Valkey + Redis support in one package
• Multi-serializer/compressor fallback for safe migrations
• Extended data structures (hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets) directly on cache
• TTL operations (ttl(), pttl(), expire(), persist())
• Pattern operations (keys(), iter_keys(), delete_pattern())
• Distributed locking (cache.lock())
• Pipelines (cache.pipeline())