How To Install

Linux

Requisites

First install the Java Run Time with the command

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre

Debian Package

Experimental packages are available for Debian.

Instructions can be found at

http://debian.neo4j.org/

Do the following steps

• Add a new file to the apt-get sources by doing

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/neo4j.list:

• Put this file the following line

deb http://debian.neo4j.org/repo stable/

• Update the list of sources by doing

sudo apt-get update

• Install the Neo4j Debian package with

sudo apt-get install neo4j

• You may get a warning about not being able to authenticate the package.

• It will be OK to ignore the warning
• at least for the purpose of playing with this tutorial.

At this point you should have Neo4j installed.

You can test it by invoking the Neo4j command shell

neo4j-shell

Direct Download

An alternative to the Debian package installation is to do a direct download from

http://neo4j.org/download/

In this case, for example, we are getting version 1.7.2 of the Community edition.

neo4j-community-1.7.2-unix.tar.gz

Then untar the file with the command

tar xzvf neo4j-community-1.7.2-unix.tar.gz

This will result in a directory named “neo4j-community-1.7.2” in your local directory.

Move this directory to “/usr/local” with the command

sudo mv ./neo4j-community-1.7.2 /usr/local

Service

To install the Linux service proceed with

cd /usr/local/neo4j-community-1.7.2/

and launch the installation with

sudo ./bin/neo4j install

it will ask you:

Graph-like power should be handled carefully. What user should run Neo4j? [neo4j]

and here we accept the default username “neo4j” by simply hitting enter.

To see if the neo4j service is running, we use the command:

service neo4j-service status

and initially it will return

Neo4j Server is not running

Then we start the service with the command

sudo service neo4j-service start

Notice that we use “sudo” for this command.

To allow for connections from any IP address to your server, edit the file

sudo vim ./conf/neo4j-server.properties

and uncomment the line

org.neo4j.server.webserver.address=0.0.0.0

Be aware that this is an unsafe way to open the server, and we are doing here only for the purpose of playing with the database for the tutorial.

Web Interface

Neo4j includes a well-crafted web interface.

In order to make it accessible, we must open the port 7474 in the server.

This is done with the command:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 7474 -j ACCEPT

and the effect can be verified with

ss -lpn

and with

netstat -anp | grep 7474

If you are running your server in an Amazon EC2 instance, you have to also open this port by creating a Security Group in the EC2 Console, or by modifying your current Security Group to also open the port 7474 with the rule

TCP Port         Source
7474             0.0.0.0/0

With this, you can now connect to the web administration tool using

firefox  http://192.168.200.148:7474/webadmin

This will display a page similar to:

and

firefox  http://192.168.200.148:7474/db/data

This will display a page similar to: