Django Channels Error – Cannot import BACKEND 'asgi_redis.RedisChannelLayer'

Question:

I have installed Django-Channels but while running the daphne-server I am getting this error given below:

File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/channels/asgi.py", line 36, in make_backend
"Cannot import BACKEND %r specified for %s" % (self.configs[name]['BACKEND'], name)

channels.asgi.InvalidChannelLayerError: Cannot import BACKEND 'asgi_redis.RedisChannelLayer' specified for default

My settings.py is:

CHANNEL_LAYERS = {
"default": {
    "BACKEND": "asgi_redis.RedisChannelLayer",
    "CONFIG": {
        "hosts": [os.environ.get('REDIS_URL', 'redis://X.X.X.X:6379')],
    },
    "ROUTING": "MyProject.routing.channel_routing",
},
}

Need help in resolving this error.

Asked By: Utkarsh Sinha

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Answers:

Just needed to install ‘asgi_redis’. I was assuming that it would have gotten installed by default while installing Django-Channels, but it doesn’t. ‘asgiref’ gets installed by default and not ‘asgi_redis’. So to solve this issue, one can just run:

> sudo pip install asgi_redis
Answered By: Utkarsh Sinha

In my case asgiref version 2.3.2 was not compatible. I downgraded it as follows and then my code worked.

pip install asgiref==1.0.0
Answered By: Jayati Deshmukh

With asgiref-2.3.2 and maybe more, you need to install channel_redis.

NOT asgi_redis.

pip install channel_redis
Answered By: jlSta

In regard to Utkarsh’s reply itt’s been renamed to:

pip install channels-redis
Answered By: drulang

I also faced same problem while working with django-channels, by following the documentation examples https://channels.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/index.html
you just need to install channels-redis as

pip install channels-redis

to resolve this issue.

Answered By: Lokesh

Faced the similar issue. Solved it by installing channels_redis:

pip install channels_redis

Also using channel redis in setting too:

CHANNEL_LAYERS = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'channels_redis.core.RedisChannelLayer',
        'CONFIG': {
            'hosts': [('localhost', 6379)],
        },
    },
    'ROUTING': 'ws.routing.application',
}
Answered By: mahbubcseju

That did the thing for me.

daphne = "~=3.0.2"
channels = "~=3.0.4"
channels-redis = "~=3.3.1"
async-timeout = "~=3.0.1"
Answered By: Serafim Suhenky

I know this is an old post, however, I got the same problem and I got the solution from this link:

https://github.com/django/channels_redis/issues/113#issuecomment-405071710

based on Andrewgodwin he says:

"asgi-redis is an outdated package (the previous version of channels_redis). You can uninstall it to solve this error."

and that worked for me

Answered By: Abdelhamed Abdin