How-To: Run Neo4j in Docker

There is an official Neo4j image on DockerHub we can use to give us a standard, ready-to-run package of Neo4j. From the DockerHub repo, we can run Community Edition or Enterprise Edition with a variety of versions of the database. The list from Neo4j’s options in dockerhub is shown below.

To determine which image we want, we need to piece together a few options. First, the neo4j tag starts each image name. After that, the version is preceded with a colon like the neo4j:4.0.0 image. We will choose to pull the latest version of the image because we want to get all the latest features. For community, the latest version is specified with neo4j:latest.

The Neo4j Docker image includes some basic configuration defaults that should not need adjustment for most cases. However, if interested, the full list of default configurations for Neo4j in Docker can be found on the GitHub repository.

By default, the Docker image exposes three ports for remote access:

We will use these ports to connect to Neo4j inside the container, accessing it from Neo4j Browser, an application, or other methods.

It is also possible to create a custom Docker image with Neo4j included, but we will not cover that here.

Retrieving and running Neo4j within a Docker container using one of the provided images requires a few steps. We will need to execute the docker run command with the neo4j image and specify any options or versions we want along with that. Let us take a look at a few options available with the docker run command.

Let us go ahead and create our Neo4j container by running the command below. An explanation of each option is in the following paragraphs.

The docker run command creates and starts a container. On the next line, --name testneo4j defines the name we want to use for the container as testneo4j. This avoids us having to reference the container by its generic id, making our container easier to reference and to remember.

Using the -p option with ports 7474 and 7687 allows us to expose and listen for traffic on both the HTTP and Bolt ports. Having the HTTP port means we can connect to our database with Neo4j Browser, and the Bolt port means efficient and type-safe communication requests between other layers and the database.

Next, we have -d. This detaches the container to run in the background, meaning we can access the container separately and see into all of its processes.

The next several lines start with the -v option. These lines define volumes we want to bind in our local directory structure so we can access certain files locally.

On the next line with the --env parameter, we initiate our Neo4j instance with a username and password. Neo4j automatically sets up basic authentication with the neo4j username as a foundation for security. Since it will initiate authentication and require a password change when first connecting, we can handle all of that in this parameter.

Finally, the last line of the command above references the Docker image we want to pull from DockerHub (neo4j), as well as any specified version (in this case, just the latest edition).

When we run this command, it will create and start the container. We can see this because it generates a container id like in the output below. Even though it creates a container id, you can reference the container using the name we set up in the command - testneo4j.

Once we execute the command above, Neo4j should be running in our Docker container! You can verify this by running docker ps.

The above output shows the results of the docker ps command, showing the container id, image:version, command, created duration, current status, exposed ports, and the container name.

Since the container is currently running, we can stop the container (without destroying it) using the docker stop testneo4j command. To start it again, we can execute docker start testneo4j. Output of both those commands is shown below. We have added docker ps commands in between the start and stop, so we can see the status of the container before and after each command.

If we did not create the container properly, and we want to start over, we will need to destroy the container before executing the docker run again with the same container name. Running the same run command that we did above will notify us that we cannot create another container with the same name as an existing container. This is shown in the output below.

In order to avoid this, we can destroy the old container (after stopping it) using the docker rm testneo4j command. Once we run this, we can use the same docker run command from earlier to create our container again. Note: docker ps has also been run to verify that the container is up after creating.

Once you are comfortable with creating, starting, and stopping the Docker container, you can start exploring other Neo4j functionality. Much of the other Neo4j processes for importing data, adding plugins, and interacting via Neo4j Browser work the same way as with any other Neo4j installation with the proper directory volumes mounted.

Congratulations! You have successfully created and started a Neo4j graph database in a Docker container!

If you have any questions or need assistance using Neo4j with Docker, reach out to us on the Community Site!

To learn more about running Neo4j with Docker, check out our documentation.