Install memcached with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, scoop, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• memcached

Project history

The official about page traces Memcached to Brad Fitzpatrick at LiveJournal in 2003. The project grew from a web scaling tool into a long-lived C daemon, with libevent-based networking and a protocol simple enough to be implemented by clients in many languages.

The project documentation frames the architecture as a virtual pool of memory: clients hash keys to servers, servers store opaque values, and servers do not coordinate with each other. This simplicity made Memcached easy to deploy horizontally and kept the daemon focused on fast memory storage, eviction, and protocol handling.

The current upstream development repository is the central GitHub repository under the memcached organization. The development wiki describes the codebase as started in 2003, stable, long-term, and performance-sensitive, with central-branch quality gates, buildbots, regression tests, and careful performance testing.

Adoption history

Memcached became a standard package across Unix-like systems and language ecosystems because its protocol and operating model are small. The official site notes APIs for most popular languages, the development wiki says portability matters because Memcached ships as a standard package on many operating systems, and the batch input lists packages across Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, Nix, MacPorts, Scoop, and zypper.

The official homepage also names Netflix as a supporter and links users to documentation, mailing lists, GitHub issues, and release notes, showing a mature infrastructure around a widely deployed daemon rather than a single-library project.

How it is used

Applications store the results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering under application-defined keys and retrieve those values before doing expensive work again. The official examples show direct protocol interaction over telnet on port 11211 with commands such as `get` and `stats`.

Operationally, administrators tune memory size, server count, and client hashing behavior rather than treating Memcached as a replicated database. The docs emphasize that servers are independent, data can expire or be evicted, and forgetting is a feature of the cache model.

Why package nerds care

Memcached is a package-manager classic: tiny enough to install everywhere, important enough to appear in nearly every server distribution, and old enough that downstreams care about init systems, portability, protocol compatibility, and security fixes. It is also a reference point for cache clients, monitoring tools, and experiments such as queues or persistent stores that reuse the memcached protocol.

Timeline

• 2003: Brad Fitzpatrick originally develops Memcached for LiveJournal.
• 2019: Development wiki describes the 2003 codebase as a stable long-term project with many users.
• 2024: Documentation site publishes the modern Memcached overview and design-philosophy pages.
• 2026-05-18: Official homepage lists v1.6.42 as the latest stable release.

Related projects

• Related projects include memcache-top for terminal stats monitoring, MemcacheQ for a queue service over the memcache protocol, language-specific Memcached clients, libevent as a core dependency, and mc-crusher for performance testing.

Sources

• https://docs.memcached.org/
• https://github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki/DevelopmentRepos
• https://memcached.org/
• https://memcached.org/about
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/memcached/memcached/master/README.md
• source_facts.package-manager-url