Guide: Making Redis & Horizon work with Sail

Recording for posterity, since this info is not in one place in the documentation and it can take a while to figure out why Redis & Horizon are not working with Sail.

Assuming you have the default Sail+redis container setup:

• first, there's no need to install predis/predis. I see this used as a workaround in many answers when in reality what you are doing is bypassing sail.

So, to get everything working using Sail proper:

• go to config/app.php and un-comment the Redis alias so you don't get 'class not found'
• in .env, add REDIS_HOST=redis so that it points to the Sail redis container
• in .env, add/change to QUEUE_CONNECTION=redis
• refresh cache php artisan config:cache
• start the horizon server php artisan horizon
• now visit localhost.test/horizon and you should see the Horizon dashboard and the 'Status' box should indicate Active.

You can do a quick code test, eg do a Redis::set('name', 'Taylor'); in Tinker and then you can even connect to the Redis DB using something like TablePlus and will see the data saved in the Redis db.

Hope it helps someone avoid the run-around to get this working.