Upstash Redis for Agents (start-redis)

A zero-config Redis database for AI agents — no signup, no UI, no SDK setup. One HTTP request returns a working endpoint + token. Databases live for 3 days unless the user claims them.

Use this when:

• The agent needs Redis right now and the user has not given you credentials.
• You want short-term memory across tool calls, conversation history, a sub-agent work queue, or recent-first ranked recall.

This is built for quick experiments, prototypes, and demos rather than production workloads or anything tied to a real user account — the database is temporary and unauthenticated until claimed, so keep PII, secrets, and production credentials out of it.

Create or re-fetch a database

# Generate a fresh UUIDv4 yourself, then POST it as the Idempotency-Key.
# The UUIDv4 you send becomes the database id.
curl -X POST -H "Idempotency-Key: <uuidv4>" https://upstash.com/start-redis

• Sending your own UUIDv4 makes the first call retry-safe — if the response is lost, retrying with the same UUID returns the same database instead of minting a duplicate.
• Re-POST with the same Idempotency-Key to re-fetch credentials for an existing database.
• The header is optional. Omit it to mint a new database with a server-generated id (returned in the response — re-fetch later by passing that id back as Idempotency-Key). Only UUIDv4 is accepted.

The response is markdown containing:

• Database ID, Endpoint, Token
• Metrics URL (JSON: uptime, commands, keys, throughput, memory, bandwidth)
• Expires date
• Console URL to share with the user (where they view usage and click Claim to keep the database)
• An inline quickstart for the body-style REST API

Parse these out of the markdown response and use them directly — there is no separate JSON envelope.

Calling the database (body-style REST)

The returned endpoint speaks the Upstash Redis REST API. Prefer the body-style form: POST a JSON array as the body so you don't have to URL-encode the command.

# SET with TTL
curl https://<endpoint> \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
  -d '["SET","session:abc","{\"step\":2}","EX","3600"]'

# GET
curl https://<endpoint> \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
  -d '["GET","session:abc"]'

You can also use the official SDKs against the same endpoint + token (@upstash/redis for TS/JS, upstash-redis for Python).

Common agent patterns

Tell the user

After provisioning, surface the console URL from the response to the user. Make clear that:

• The database expires in 3 days.
• They can view usage at the console URL and click Claim to keep it.
• This is unauthenticated scratch storage — don't put secrets or PII in it.

Reference

• Service entry point (also serves the GET doc): https://upstash.com/start-redis
• Full REST API: https://upstash.com/docs/redis/features/restapi
• TS/JS SDK: https://upstash.com/docs/redis/sdks/ts
• Python SDK: https://upstash.com/docs/redis/sdks/py