Neo4j from JavaScript

Goals

If you are a JavaScript developer, this guide provides an overview of options for connecting to Neo4j. While this guide is not comprehensive it will introduce the different Drivers and link to the relevant resources.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with graph database concepts and the property graph model. You should have created an Neo4j AuraDB cloud instance, or installed Neo4j locally

Intermediate

Neo4j for JavaScript Developers

Neo4j provides drivers which allow you to make a connection to the database and develop applications which create, read, update, and delete information from the graph.

You can use the official driver for JavaScript (neo4j-driver) or connect via HTTP using the request module or any of our community drivers.

Learn with GraphAcademy

Building Neo4j Applications with Node.js

In this free course, we walk through the steps to integrate Neo4j into your Node.js projects. You will learn about the Neo4j JavaScript Driver, how sessions and transactions work and how to query Neo4j from an existing application.

Learn more

Neo4j Javascript Driver

The Neo4j JavaScript driver is officially supported by Neo4j and connects to the database using the binary protocol. It aims to be minimal, while being idiomatic to JavaScript, allowing you to subscribe to a stream of responses, errors and completion events.

npm install neo4j-driver

const neo4j = require('neo4j-driver')

const driver = neo4j.driver(uri, neo4j.auth.basic(user, password))
const session = driver.session()
const personName = 'Alice'

try {
  const result = await session.run(
    'CREATE (a:Person {name: $name}) RETURN a',
    { name: personName }
  )

  const singleRecord = result.records[0]
  const node = singleRecord.get(0)

  console.log(node.properties.name)
} finally {
  await session.close()
}

// on application exit:
await driver.close()

Driver Configuration

From Neo4j version 4.0 and onwards, the default encryption setting is off by default and Neo4j will no longer generate self-signed certificates. This applies to default installations, installations through Neo4j Desktop and Docker images. You can verify the encryption level of your server by checking the dbms.connector.bolt.enabled key in neo4j.conf.

Table 1. Table Scheme Usage
Certificate Type	Neo4j Causal Cluster	Neo4j Standalone Server	Direct Connection to Cluster Member
Unencrypted	`neo4j`	`neo4j`	`bolt`
Encrypted with Full Certificate	`neo4j+s`	`neo4j+s`	`bolt+s`
Encrypted with Self-Signed Certificate	`neo4j+ssc`	`neo4j+ssc`	`bolt+ssc`
Neo4j AuraDB	`neo4j+s`	N/A	N/A

Please review your SSL Framework settings when going into production. If necessary, you can also generate certificates for Neo4j with Letsencrypt

Name

Version

Authors

neo4j-driver

4.4.5

The Neo4j Team

Package

Neo4j Online Community

Docs

API

Source

The Example Project

The Neo4j example project is a small, one page webapp for the movies database built into the Neo4j tutorial. The front-end page is the same for all drivers: movie search, movie details, and a graph visualization of actors and movies. Each backend implementation shows you how to connect to Neo4j from each of the different languages and drivers.

You can learn more about our small, consistent example project across many different language drivers here. You will find the implementations for all drivers as individual GitHub repositories, which you can clone and deploy directly.

Neo4j Community Drivers

Members of the each programming language community have invested a lot of time and love to develop each one of the community drivers for Neo4j, so if you use any one of them, please provide feedback to the authors.

The community drivers have been graciously contributed by the Neo4j community. Many of them are fully featured and well-maintained, but some may not be. Neo4j does not take any responsibility for their usability.

js2neo

As a demonstration of a minimal JavaScript based bolt driver, Nigel Small put together js2neo.

Using the HTTP-Endpoint directly

You can use something as simple as the request node-module to send queries to and receive responses from Neo4j. The endpoint protocol and formats are explained in detail in the Neo4j Manual. It enables you do to much more, e.g. sending many statements per request or keeping transactions open across multiple requests.

Here is a very simple example:

Simple Function Accessing the Remote Endpoint

var r=require("request");
var txUrl = "http://localhost:7474/db/data/transaction/commit";
function cypher(query,params,cb) {
  r.post({uri:txUrl,
          json:{statements:[{statement:query,parameters:params}]}},
         function(err,res) { cb(err,res.body)})
}

Running the Function

var query="MATCH (n:User) RETURN n, labels(n) as l LIMIT {limit}"
var params={limit: 10}
var cb=function(err,data) { console.log(JSON.stringify(data)) }

cypher(query,params,cb)

{"results":[
  {"columns":["n","l"],
   "data":[
     {"row":[{"name":"Aran"},["User"]]}
    ]
  }],
 "errors":[]}

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