Vercel Python Runtime - 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.

This quickstart uses django but you can easily adapt it to Flask, FastAPI or plain Python, see Vercel Python Templates.

Project Setup

Let's create a new django application from Vercel's template.

npx create-next-app vercel-django --example "https://github.com/vercel/examples/tree/main/python/django"cd vercel-django

Environment Setup

The template manages its dependencies with uv. Add upstash-redis and install everything:

uv add upstash-redis

Database Setup

Create a Redis database using Upstash Console or Upstash CLI and export UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL and UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN to your environment.

export UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL=<YOUR_URL>export UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN=<YOUR_TOKEN>

View Setup

Update /example/views.py:

/example/views.py

from django.http import HttpResponsefrom upstash_redis import Redisredis = Redis.from_env()def index(request):    count = redis.incr('counter')    html = f'''    <html>        <body>            <h1>Counter: { count }</h1>        </body>    </html>    '''    return HttpResponse(html)

Run & Deploy

Run the app locally:

uv run python manage.py runserver

Check http://localhost:8000/

Deploy your app with vercel

Set UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL, UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN and DJANGO_SECRET_KEY in your project's Settings -> Environment Variables. You can generate a secret key with:

uv run python -c 'from django.core.management.utils import get_random_secret_key; print(get_random_secret_key())'

Redeploy from Deployments tab.

You can also integrate your Vercel projects with Upstash using Vercel Integration module. Check this article.