By the numbers

Data collected on 2026-04-30 from the unstable branch at commit 0bbb196c4.

This page is a quantitative snapshot of the codebase. It is regenerated each time the wiki is rebuilt.

Size

Metric	Value
Total .c files (excluding deps/)	219
Total .h files (excluding deps/)	81
Total lines of .c source (excluding deps/)	200,399
Total lines of .h source (excluding deps/)	16,012
Lines in src/ only (.c + .h)	~190,000
Tcl test files	219
JSON command spec files (src/commands/)	244

xychart-beta horizontal
    title "Lines of code by file (top 10 in src/, excluding generated commands.def)"
    x-axis ["module.c", "redis-cli.c", "server.c", "cluster_legacy.c", "t_stream.c", "networking.c", "sentinel.c", "replication.c", "t_zset.c", "rdb.c"]
    y-axis "Lines" 0 --> 16000
    bar [15743, 11144, 8222, 6581, 6197, 5783, 5474, 5452, 5033, 4659]

src/commands.def is generated and clocks in at 485,000 bytes (12,000 lines); it is excluded from the chart so handwritten code is comparable.

Structure

Directory	Purpose	Lines (.c + .h)
src/	The Redis server, CLI, and check tools.	~190,000
src/commands/	One JSON file per command.	~600 KB across 244 files.
src/modules/	In-tree sample modules.	~13,000.
tests/	Tcl test harness.	n/a (Tcl).
modules/vector-sets/	Built-in vector index.	~7,500 (compiled into redis-server).
deps/	Vendored third-party libraries.	Not counted; out of project scope.

Activity

Metric	Value
Total commits on unstable	13,052
Commits in the last 365 days	485
Unique authors	914
First commit	2009-03-22 (Salvatore Sanfilippo)
Most recent commit (this snapshot)	2026-04-29

Churn hotspots (last 90 days)

File	Commits
src/server.h	22
src/module.c	16
src/db.c	16
src/server.c	14
src/rdb.c	14
src/t_stream.c	12
src/commands.def	11
src/cluster.c	11
src/t_hash.c	10
src/cluster_asm.c	8

server.h and commands.def are the two structural files that change every time someone adds a configuration option or a command. The presence of cluster_asm.c (Auto Slot Migration) and t_hash.c (hash-field TTL work) as hotspots reflects the active feature themes of the recent quarter.

Bot-attributed commits

Searching the full git history for committer or co-author lines containing [bot] returns 0 matches. Redis does not currently use Dependabot/Renovate-style automated bots in its unstable branch, and there is no factory-droid[bot] or github-actions[bot] co-authorship history. This is a lower bound — inline AI tools (Copilot etc.) leave no signal in commit metadata.

The closest thing to bot-authored work is the auto-generated file src/commands.def, produced by utils/generate-command-code.py. That file is committed with a real author identity, so it does not count.

Contribution distribution

The repo has 914 unique committers in its 17-year history. The top six committers between them author the bulk of src/:

Range	Approx. share
Top 1 (antirez / Salvatore Sanfilippo, counting both spellings)	~55%
Top 5	~70%
Top 20	~80%
Top 100	~92%

Per-person line counts are intentionally omitted from this page; see Maintainers for the by-subsystem ownership table.

Complexity

The five largest single files in src/:

File	Lines
module.c	15,743
redis-cli.c	11,144
server.c	8,222
cluster_legacy.c	6,581
t_stream.c	6,197

These are the natural candidates for refactoring. module.c is dominated by the API surface — every RedisModule_* exported symbol is implemented there — and is unlikely to shrink. redis-cli.c is a single-binary interactive shell that has accreted dozens of subcommands; it is a typical cleanup-opportunity candidate.

The deepest include chain runs src/server.h → commands.h, object.h, redismodule.h, keymeta.h, plus another two dozen direct headers. Practically every .c file in src/ includes server.h (transitively pulling in the entire schema for a redisServer, client, and redisDb). The codebase deliberately avoids per-translation-unit headers for the most common types.

Tests

Suite	File count
Unit (tests/unit/)	90+ Tcl files (some collected in unit/type/)
Integration (tests/integration/)	28 Tcl files
Cluster (tests/cluster/)	Sub-tree
Sentinel (tests/sentinel/)	Sub-tree
Module API (tests/unit/moduleapi/, helper modules in tests/modules/)	60+ files

The C-level unit tests embedded in redis-server (the redis-server test ... invocation) cover dict, ziplist, listpack, intset, sds, kvstore, t-digest, bloom, vset, gcra, fast_float_strtod, crc, hyperloglog, and a few internals.