Using Neo4j from .NET

If you are a .NET 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.

Neo4j for .NET 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.

Neo4j .Net Driver

The Neo4j .NET driver is officially supported by Neo4j and connects to the database using the binary protocol. It aims to be minimal, while being idiomatic to .NET.

PM> Install-Package Neo4j.Driver-5.19.0

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 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

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

Name

Version

Authors

Neo4j .Net Driver

5.19.0

The Neo4j Team, Charlotte Skardon, Martin Jensen

NuGet Package

.NET Example, .NET core example

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.