django-vcache

A fast, async-native Django cache backend for Valkey (and Redis). Opinionated and secure by default.

It powers the GlitchTip open-source error tracking platform.

Why django-vcache?

Fast — Rust I/O driver with msgpack serialization (via ormsgpack). 13x faster than Django's built-in RedisCache under concurrent ASGI load.
Async-native — True async I/O, not sync_to_async thread-pool wrappers. Single multiplexed connection handles all concurrency.
Secure by default — No pickle. Msgpack cannot execute arbitrary code on deserialization. No special configuration needed.
Efficient — One multiplexed connection for both sync and async. No connection pool to tune. Automatic zstd compression for large values.
Python 3.14 ready — Uses stdlib compression.zstd on 3.14+, no third-party compression dependency needed.

pip install django-vcache

CACHES = {
    "default": {
        "BACKEND": "django_vcache.backend.ValkeyCache",
        "LOCATION": "valkey://your-valkey-host:6379/1",
    },
}

from django.core.cache import cache

cache.set('my_key', 'my_value', 30)
value = cache.get('my_key')

Status: Stable and used in production.