Serializers

django-cachex supports pluggable serializers for data before sending to Valkey/Redis.

Configuration

CACHES = {
    "default": {
        "BACKEND": "django_cachex.cache.ValkeyCache",
        "LOCATION": "valkey://127.0.0.1:6379/1",
        "OPTIONS": {
            "serializer": "django_cachex.serializers.json.JSONSerializer",
        }
    }
}

Available Serializers

Serializer	Description
django_cachex.serializers.pickle.PickleSerializer	Python pickle (default) - supports all Python types
django_cachex.serializers.json.JSONSerializer	JSON - interoperable but limited to JSON types
django_cachex.serializers.msgpack.MessagePackSerializer	MessagePack - fast and compact binary format

MessagePack requires the optional dependency:

uv add django-cachex[msgpack]

Fallback for Migration

Specify a list of serializers to safely migrate between formats. The first is used for writing, all are tried for reading:

"OPTIONS": {
    "serializer": [
        "django_cachex.serializers.json.JSONSerializer",     # Write with new format
        "django_cachex.serializers.pickle.PickleSerializer", # Read old format
    ],
}

Custom Serializers

Implement dumps and loads methods, raising SerializerError on failure:

from django_cachex.serializers.base import BaseSerializer
from django_cachex.exceptions import SerializerError

class MySerializer(BaseSerializer):
    def dumps(self, value):
        return my_encode(value)

    def loads(self, value):
        try:
            return my_decode(value)
        except MyDecodeError as e:
            raise SerializerError from e