Using Neo4j from Go

If you are a Go 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.

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 Go 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 Go Driver

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

Module version

Make sure your application has been set up to use go modules (there should be a go.mod file in your application root). Add the driver with:

go get github.com/neo4j/neo4j-go-driver/v5

If you need to pin a specific 5.x version, you can run this instead:

go get github.com/neo4j/neo4j-go-driver/v5@<5.x tag>

where <5.x tag> is one of the available tag (e.g.: v5.3.0).

func helloWorld(ctx context.Context, uri, username, password string) (string, error) {
	driver, err := neo4j.NewDriverWithContext(uri, neo4j.BasicAuth(username, password, ""))
	if err != nil {
		return "", err
	}
	defer driver.Close(ctx)

	session := driver.NewSession(ctx, neo4j.SessionConfig{AccessMode: neo4j.AccessModeWrite})
	defer session.Close(ctx)

	greeting, err := session.ExecuteWrite(ctx, func(transaction neo4j.ManagedTransaction) (any, error) {
		result, err := transaction.Run(ctx,
			"CREATE (a:Greeting) SET a.message = $message RETURN a.message + ', from node ' + id(a)",
			map[string]any{"message": "hello, world"})
		if err != nil {
			return nil, err
		}

		if result.Next(ctx) {
			return result.Record().Values[0], nil
		}

		return nil, result.Err()
	})
	if err != nil {
		return "", err
	}

	return greeting.(string), nil
}

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

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

5.19.0

The Neo4j Team

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 can find the implementations for all drivers as individual GitHub repositories, which you can clone and deploy directly.