Appends the specified stream entry to the stream at the specified key. If the key does not exist, as a side effect of running this command the key is created with a stream value.

An entry is composed of a set of field-value pairs, it is basically a small dictionary. The field-value pairs are stored in the same order they are given by the user, and commands to read the stream such as XRANGE or XREAD are guaranteed to return the fields and values exactly in the same order they were added by XADD.

XADD is the only Redis command that can add data to a stream, but there are other commands, such as XDEL and XTRIM, that are able to remove data from a stream.

Specifying a Stream ID as an argument

A stream entry ID identifies a given entry inside a stream. The XADD command will auto-generate a unique ID for you if the ID argument specified is the * character (asterisk ASCII character). However, while useful only in very rare cases, it is possible to specify a well-formed ID, so that the new entry will be added exactly with the specified ID.

IDs are specified by two numbers separated by a - character:

1526919030474-55

Both quantities are 64-bit numbers. When an ID is auto-generated, the first part is the Unix time in milliseconds of the Redis instance generating the ID. The second part is just a sequence number and is used in order to distinguish IDs generated in the same millisecond.

IDs are guaranteed to be always incremental: If you compare the ID of the entry just inserted it will be greater than any other past ID, so entries are totally ordered inside a stream. In order to guarantee this property, if the current top ID in the stream has a time greater than the current local time of the instance, the top entry time will be used instead, and the sequence part of the ID incremented. This may happen when, for instance, the local clock jumps backward, or if after a failover the new master has a different absolute time.

When a user specified an explicit ID to XADD, the minimum valid ID is 0-1, and the user must specify an ID which is greater than any other ID currently inside the stream, otherwise the command will fail. Usually resorting to specific IDs is useful only if you have another system generating unique IDs (for instance an SQL table) and you really want the Redis stream IDs to match the one of this other system.

Capped streams

It is possible to limit the size of the stream to a maximum number of elements using the MAXLEN option.

Trimming with MAXLEN can be expensive compared to just adding entries with XADD: streams are represented by macro nodes into a radix tree, in order to be very memory efficient. Altering the single macro node, consisting of a few tens of elements, is not optimal. So it is possible to give the command in the following special form:

XADD mystream MAXLEN ~ 1000 * ... entry fields here ...

The ~ argument between the MAXLEN option and the actual count means that the user is not really requesting that the stream length is exactly 1000 items, but instead it could be a few tens of entries more, but never less than 1000 items. When this option modifier is used, the trimming is performed only when Redis is able to remove a whole macro node. This makes it much more efficient, and it is usually what you want.

Additional information about streams

For further information about Redis streams please check our introduction to Redis Streams document.

@return

@bulk-string-reply, specifically:

The command returns the ID of the added entry. The ID is the one auto-generated if * is passed as ID argument, otherwise the command just returns the same ID specified by the user during insertion.

@examples

XADD mystream * name Sara surname OConnor
XADD mystream * field1 value1 field2 value2 field3 value3
XLEN mystream
XRANGE mystream - +