Introduction

Being in a consulting position, I often find myself being asked to perform tasks in technical areas I know close to nothing about. For example I was asked to setup a Neo4J server in Amazon, and figure out how to export and import data from a developer’s laptop with a local setup of the database.

I could spend days learning how Neo4J works, but instead I read up a bit on the official site: https://neo4j.com, and proceeded to run neo4j on a docker container

If you are new to docker take the time to get familiar with Docker images and containers

In this post I will detail the following steps:

  • Preparing to run neo4j docker containers
  • Running a clean neo4j docker container
  • In neo4j setting up a demo database
  • Export the demo database
  • Run a second clean neo4j docker container
  • Import the dumped database

Running the neo4j docker

Install Docker on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get -y install docker-engine
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
sudo reboot

Prepare your file system for two docker containers

Prepare Logs and Data directories for first docker

mkdir -p ~/neo4j/data ~/neo4j/logs
mkdir -p ~/neo4j/data2 ~/neo4j/logs2

Docker pull neo4j

docker pull neo4j

Make sure all docker containers are removed

docker rm `docker ps -a -q`

Run vanialla neo4j docker

docker run \
--publish=7474:7474 --publish=7687:7687 \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/data:/data \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/logs:/logs \
neo4j

You should get:

Starting Neo4j.
2017-02-06 07:59:34.533+0000 INFO  No SSL certificate found, generating a self-signed certificate..
2017-02-06 07:59:35.686+0000 INFO  Starting...
2017-02-06 07:59:36.736+0000 INFO  Bolt enabled on 0.0.0.0:7687.
2017-02-06 07:59:41.491+0000 INFO  Started.
2017-02-06 07:59:43.586+0000 INFO  Remote interface available at http://localhost:7474/

Open http://localhost:7474 in your browser

(Ignore the temporary red that might appear, you should be redirected to http://localhost:7474/browser)

neo4j-initial-login

Login with password neo4j and set a new password

Creating a demo database

At this stage there is no data on server, in order to create something, we will use the demo Movie/Actor database.

In the Editor type: :play movie graph like so:

neo4j-editor-play-movie

And press Enter

Press the Next arrow on the right

Follow the instructions:

  1. Click on the code block
  2. Notice it gets copied to the editor above
  3. Click the editor’s play button to execute
  4. Wait for the query to finish

The database is created and presented

neo4j-demo-db-created

Export the demo database

In order to export the database you will need to stop the neo4j server, but stopping the neo4j server on a running docker will essentially stop the docker container completely.

So we will do the following:

  1. Stop the docker container - in the terminal from which you ran the container press CTRL c
  2. Run a container with the same data, but this time run /bin/bash on it - allowing for interactive access to the server:
docker run \
--publish=7474:7474 --publish=7687:7687 \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/data:/data \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/logs:/logs \
-i -t neo4j /bin/bash

You should get a bash prompt:

bash-4.3#

In it type:

./bin/neo4j-admin dump --database=graph.db --to=/data/2017-02-05.dump

Exit the docker

bash-4.3# exit

The docker container will stop

Run a second clean neo4j docker container

Let’s make sure there are no containers, running or stopped

docker rm -f `docker ps -a -q`

And let’s double check we actually load a clean neo4j server

sudo rm -rf ~/neo4j/data2/*

Now, run the second container

docker run \
--publish=7474:7474 --publish=7687:7687 \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/data2:/data \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/logs2:/logs \
neo4j

Again - you should get

Starting Neo4j.
2017-02-06 10:30:18.970+0000 INFO  No SSL certificate found, generating a self-signed certificate..
2017-02-06 10:30:20.100+0000 INFO  Starting...
2017-02-06 10:30:20.917+0000 INFO  Bolt enabled on 0.0.0.0:7687.
2017-02-06 10:30:24.738+0000 INFO  Started.
2017-02-06 10:30:26.448+0000 INFO  Remote interface available at http://localhost:7474/

After logging in - you will note there is not data defined

neo4j-no-data

Stop the docker container - in the terminal from which you ran the container press CTRL c

On your PC copy the dump file to the “volume” of the new docker container:

cp ~/neo4j/data/2017-02-05.dump ~/neo4j/data2/

Now run the a container with a bash prompt:

docker run \
--publish=7474:7474 --publish=7687:7687 \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/data2:/data \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/logs2:/logs \
-i -t neo4j /bin/bash

In the container prompt:

bash-4.3# bin/neo4j-admin load --from=/data/2017-02-05.dump --database=graph.db --force

Exit the docker

bash-4.3# exit

And start a container with neo4j running

docker run \
--publish=7474:7474 --publish=7687:7687 \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/data2:/data \
--volume=$HOME/neo4j/logs2:/logs \
neo4j

Go to http://localhost:7474/browser/

And note that there is a database in place:

neo4j-with-data

Click the * Star to the right of Movie & Person

neo4j-click-star

The graphic representation of the database should appear

neo4j-graph-database

Summary

Learning something new can be a lot of a hard work, with the help of docker setting up a service is pretty quick, and in this case the specific task of learning how to export/import is now understood without the need to learn a whole lot of installation and configuration material.