Laravel has support out of the box for using Redis. However, by default it uses a Redis client written in PHP, which will always be a little slower than one written in C. If you're making heavy use of Redis, it may be worth using the phpiredis extension to squeeze a little more performance out of it.

I'm using PHP 7.0 on Ubuntu Zesty and I installed the dependencies with the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install libhiredis-dev php-redis php7.0-dev

Then I installed phpiredis as follows:

1git clone https://github.com/nrk/phpiredis.git && \
2       cd phpiredis && \
3       phpize && \
4       ./configure --enable-phpiredis && \
5       make && \
6       sudo make install

Finally, I configured Redis to use phpiredis in the redis section of config/database.php for a Laravel app:

1    'redis' => [
2
3        'cluster' => false,
4
5        'default' => [
6            'host'     => env('REDIS_HOST', 'localhost'),
7            'password' => env('REDIS_PASSWORD', null),
8            'port'     => env('REDIS_PORT', 6379),
9            'database' => 0,
10            'options' => [
11                'connections' => [
12                    'tcp' => 'Predis\Connection\PhpiredisStreamConnection', // PHP streams
13                    'unix' => 'Predis\Connection\PhpiredisSocketConnection', // ext-socket
14                ],
15            ]
16        ],
17    ],

Now, I'm going to be honest - in a casual comparison I couldn't see much difference in terms of speed. I would probably only bother with setting this up on a site where high Redis performance was absolutely necessary. If you just want a quicker cache response it might make more sense to put Varnish in front of the site instead. However, in cases where Redis gets used heavily, it's probably worth doing.