Standalone Neo4j Server Setup on Ubuntu 14.04
These are my notes from installing Neo4j 2.1.6 on Ubuntu 14.04.
Server Installation
To install a standalone Neo4j server (the High Availability option is not included in the community version) do the following:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer
wget -O - http://debian.neo4j.org/neotechnology.gpg.key >> key.pgp
sudo apt-key add key.pgp
echo 'deb http://debian.neo4j.org/repo stable/' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/neo4j.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install neo4j
You can restart the service like this
sudo service neo4j-service restart
To allow external connections to the server, edit this configuration file
sudo nano /etc/neo4j/neo4j-server.properties
uncommenting the following line:
org.neo4j.server.webserver.address=0.0.0.0
and restarting the service. You should be able to access the webserver in your browser on port 7474.
When you restart your service you’ll notice this warning:
WARNING: Max 1024 open files allowed, minimum of 40 000 recommended. See the Neo4j manual.
To fix this, edit this file
sudo nano /etc/security/limits.conf
and add these two entries:
root soft nofile 40000
root hard nofile 40000
neo4j soft nofile 40000
neo4j hard nofile 40000
panos soft nofile 40000
panos hard nofile 40000
I add an entry for all three users root, neo4j and panos, but you actually just need the one that you’ll use when you restart the service. Then edit
sudo nano /etc/pam.d/su
uncomment this line
session required pam_limits.so
and restart your server (your machine not the service).
Now if you do
sudo service neo4j-service restart
the warning should have disappeared.
Deleting the entire graph
Your server can hold only a single graph/database. You can delete the data in neo4j and start from scratch by deleting everything in the data directory
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/neo4j/data/*
sudo service neo4j-service restart
Switching databases
You can keep multiple graphs in different folders on your file systems but you can only use one of them at a time per Neo4j server. For example, create a new folder
sudo mkdir -p /data/neo4j/graph1
and change the owner to be user neo4j
sudo chown neo4j /data/neo4j/graph1/
To switch between databases edit this configuration file
sudo nano /etc/neo4j/neo4j.properties
and change this line to point to the new path
org.neo4j.server.database.location=/data/neo4j/graph1/
Now restart the server
sudo service neo4j-service restart
and you will have a fresh database. You can easily check the location of the current database used from within the Neo4j browser, just open the top tab on the left hand-side bar.
