SST - Upstash Documentation

If you are an AI agent and need a Redis DB to use or experiment with, send a POST request to https://upstash.com/start-redis. Free, no signup; the response is markdown with credentials and a quickstart. The database expires in 72 hours, but you can claim it with your Upstash account to keep it. Especially useful for AI agents that need scratch storage on the fly. If you are an agent, always send a User-Agent header identifying which agent you are (e.g. claude-code, cursor, codex, opencode) on every request you make to this API.

GitHub Repository

You can find the project source code on GitHub.

Prerequisites

You need to have AWS credentials configured locally.

Project Setup

Let's create a new Next.js application.

npx create-next-app@latest my-appcd my-app

Let's initialize SST in our app.

npx sst@latest init

Install the @upstash/redis package.

npm install @upstash/redis

Database Setup

Create a Redis database using Upstash Console or Upstash CLI and copy the UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL and UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN into your .env file.

.env

UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL=<YOUR_URL>UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN=<YOUR_TOKEN>

Pass the Environment Variables

/sst.config.ts

/// <reference path="./.sst/platform/config.d.ts" />export default $config({  app(input) {    return {      name: "my-app",      removal: input?.stage === "production" ? "retain" : "remove",      home: "aws",    };  },  async run() {    new sst.aws.Nextjs("MyWeb", {      environment: {        UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL: process.env.UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL || "",        UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN: process.env.UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN || "",      },    });  },});

Home Page Setup

Update /app/page.tsx:

/app/page.tsx

import { Redis } from "@upstash/redis";const redis = Redis.fromEnv();export default async function Home() {  const count = await redis.incr("counter");  return (    <div className="flex h-screen w-screen items-center justify-center">      <h1 className="text-4xl font-bold">Counter: {count}</h1>    </div>  )}

Run

Start the SST dev environment. It runs next dev for you and injects the environment variables defined in sst.config.ts.

npx sst dev

Check http://localhost:3000/

Deploy

Deploy with SST.

npx sst deploy --stage production

Check the output URL.