16.2.3.7 Using MySQL and memcached with Ruby

There are a number of different modules for interfacing to memcached within Ruby. The Ruby-MemCache client library provides a native interface to memcached that does not require any external libraries, such as libmemcached. You can obtain the installer package from http://www.deveiate.org/projects/RMemCache.

To install, extract the package and then run install.rb:

shell> install.rb

If you have RubyGems, you can install the Ruby-MemCache gem:

shell> gem install Ruby-MemCache
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Install required dependency io-reactor? [Yn]  y
Successfully installed Ruby-MemCache-0.0.1
Successfully installed io-reactor-0.05
Installing ri documentation for io-reactor-0.05...
Installing RDoc documentation for io-reactor-0.05...

To use a memcached instance from within Ruby, create a new instance of the MemCache object.

require 'memcache'
memc = MemCache::new '198.51.100.100:11211'

You can add a weight to each server to increase the likelihood of the server being selected during hashing by appending the weight count to the server host name/port string:

require 'memcache'
memc = MemCache::new '198.51.100.100:11211:3'

To add servers to an existing list, you can append them directly to the MemCache object:

memc += ["198.51.100.101:11211"]

To set data into the cache, you can just assign a value to a key within the new cache object, which works just like a standard Ruby hash object:

memc["key"] = "value"

Or to retrieve the value:

print memc["key"]

For more explicit actions, you can use the method interface, which mimics the main memcached API functions, as summarized in the following table.

Ruby `MemCache` Method	Equivalent memcached API Functions
`get()`	Generic `get()`.
`get_hash(keys)`	Get the values of multiple `keys`, returning the information as a hash of the keys and their values.
`set()`	Generic `set()`.
`set_many(pairs)`	Set the values of the keys and values in the hash `pairs`.
`add()`	Generic `add()`.
`replace()`	Generic `replace()`.
`delete()`	Generic `delete()`.
`incr()`	Generic `incr()`.
`decr()`	Generic `decr()`.