is it possible to call lua functions defined in other lua scripts in redis?

Question

I have tried to declare a function without the local keyword and then call that function from anther script but it gives me an error when I run the command.

Answer 1

Important Notice: See Josiah's answer below. My answer turns out to be wrong or at the least incomplete. Which makes me very happy ofcourse, it makes Redis all the more flexible.

My incorrect/incomplete answer:

I'm quite sure this is not possible. You are not allowed to use global variables (read the docs ), and the script itself gets a local and temporary scope by the Redis Lua engine.

Lua functions automatically set a 'writing' flag behind the scenes if they do any write action. This starts a transaction. If you cascade Lua calls, the bookkeeping in Redis would become very cumbersome, especially when the cascade is executed on a Redis slave. That's why EVAL and EVALSHA are intentionally not made available as valid Redis calls inside a Lua script. Same goes for calling an already 'loaded' Lua function which you are trying to do. What would happen if the slave is rebooted between the load of the first script and the exec of the second script?

What we do to overcome this limitation:

Don't use EVAL, only use SCRIPT LOAD and EVALSHA. Store the SHA1 inside a redis hash set.

We automated this in our versioning system, so a committed Lua script automatically gets it's SHA1 checksum stored in the Redis master, in a hash set, with a logical name. The clients can't use EVAL (on a slave; we disabled EVAL+LOAD in config). But the client can ask for the SHA1 for the next step. Almost all our Lua functions return a SHA1 for the next call.

Hope this helps, TW