Deploying a GRANDstack application to AuraDB

We’re going to deploy an application built on top of a graph containing football transfers scraped from transfermarkt.co.uk. See Football Transfers Graph to learn more about the dataset.

The first thing we need to do, in Neo4j Desktop, is create a remote connection to our AuraDB database. See the Connect to Neo4j AuraDB with Neo4j Desktop guide for step by step instructions explaining how to do this.

We’re going to use the Neo4j Cloud Tool to import our data, so let’s see how to set up that application. We can install that directly via this link, or if that doesn’t work we can paste the following URL into the Graph App URL field on the Graph Applications menu:

Once we do that we’ll see the following prompt:

We can now launch the Neo4j Cloud Tool, which will take us to the following screen:

We’re going to use the Neo4j Cloud tool to import this dataset.

Click on the Check existing database button. This will check whether our AuraDB database contains existing data. Assuming an empty database, we’ll see the following screen:

Clicking on the Next button will take us to the following screen:

From here we can import databases or a dump file. We’ll be using the latter functionality to import a dump containing the football transfers database.

The dump file can be downloaded from aura-datasets.s3.amazonaws.com/football-transfers.dump. Once we’ve downloaded that file we’ll select it as the dump file to import. After that we’ll click on the Import Dump file button. This will take a few minutes to run, but eventually we’ll see output similar to the following:

Click on the View data in Neo4j Browser button to see what we’ve imported. The diagram below shows a sample of the imported graph:

Let’s have a look at the GRANDstack application that we’re going to deploy. The application is a football transfers one built on top of the graph that we imported in the previous step. See Football Transfers Graph App with the GRANDstack Starter Kit to learn more about the application itself.

The following command will clone the football transfers project locally:

The application has two parts:

The diagram below shows the architecture of our application and how it interacts with Neo4j:

We’re going to deploy the application using ZEIT, a cloud platform for websites and serverless APIS.

First we’ll need to create an account on that platform via zeit.co/signup.

Once we’ve done that we can install the Now CLI on our machine using instructions from zeit.co/download:

Now let’s login to ZEIT using the Now CLI tool:

If we run that, we’ll see the following output:

Once we’ve entered our credentials we’ll receive an email which will contain a link that we need to click to verify that we want to login. The console will then be updated with the following message:

Now we’re ready to tell ZEIT about our database credentials. We’ll need to provide the following details:

If we open our Neo4j AuraDB Console Dashboard, we’ll see a list of our databases.

We’ll need to use the Bolt URL, so let’s copy that onto our clipboard:

The default username is neo4j and the default password is generated on database creation.

For the database described above we’d have the following credentials:

We can run the following commands to add these credentials as ZEIT secrets.

We’re now ready to deploy our application, which we can do by executing the following command:

Running this command will result in the following output:

We can then navigate to the provided URL, which in this case is https://grand-stack-starter-seven-wheat.now.sh/. Once this page has loaded, we’ll see a list of the top transfers:

We can navigate to other screens via the left menu:

My favourite one is Country Money Flow, so let’s have a look at that:

We’ve now deployed our first GRANDstack application. If any of the steps don’t make sense or didn’t work, please let us know in the GraphQL and GRANDstack topic on the community site.

Helpful guides and support are available on the AuraDB support pages.

You can also ask questions and connect with other people launching Neo4j AuraDB at the cloud topic on the community site.