Upgrade to a Neo4j 2025 release

Important

It is recommended to read the Introduction before continuing.

Upgrading to 2025.x

You can upgrade from any version of Neo4j 2025 to any subsequent version, by following the instructions for either standalone servers or clusters. The upgrade steps are identical to upgrading Neo4j 5.

You can also upgrade from Neo4j 5.26 LTS to any Neo4j 2025 version.

Neo4j 5.26 LTS is a checkpoint version. This means that:

  • All upgrades from earlier than 5.26 must first upgrade to Neo4j 5.26 LTS.

  • There are changes to Neo4j and its configuration that require attention. Some deprecated features have been removed, software requirements and the default configurations have been changed. See Changes from Neo4j 5 to 2025.x for details.

Migrating databases from Neo4j 4.4 LTS to Neo4j 2025.01

Migrating a Neo4j 4.4 LTS server to Neo4j 2025.01 is possible by first upgrading to 5.26 LTS (see Migrate databases from 4.4 LTS) and then upgrading from Neo4j 5.26 LTS to Neo4j 2025.01 following the instructions in this section.

Overview of standalone and cluster upgrades

Start by reviewing the Release Notes to see what has been introduced or changed in the new version. If you are upgrading to a version that is right after an LTS release, you may want to check the Operations Manual → Deprecations, removals, and changes per Neo4j version to see what has been deprecated in the LTS release and what updated or removed in the new version.
Depending on how your application interacts with Neo4j, you might need to update your application to work with the new version of Neo4j.

Standalone servers

The steps to upgrade a standalone server (one that’s not part of a cluster) are:

  1. Stop the old Neo4j server.

  2. Install the new version of Neo4j.

  3. Start the new Neo4j server.
    You can monitor the logs to see how the upgrade is progressing. The neo4j.log file contains information on the upgrade.

Where applicable, it is recommended to use a package manager to install Neo4j. This simplifies the process and ensures that the configuration and state are preserved.

Follow the links to some walkthroughs of upgrading a Neo4j standalone server:

Clusters

Depending on the type of cluster you have, there are different strategies for upgrading a Neo4j cluster.

Basic cluster

There are two strategies for upgrading a basic cluster:

  • New server rolling upgrade — A new server is added before an existing server is taken offline. This approach keeps the cluster available and fault-tolerant throughout the upgrade. This approach is suitable for deployments that use replaceable cloud or container resources.

  • In-place rolling upgrade — Each server is taken offline and upgraded one at a time. The server is reconnected to the cluster before the next is taken offline. This approach keeps the cluster available throughout the upgrade. However, it does reduce fault tolerance while each server is offline.

Should the data stores fall out of sync during the process, you may need to re-seed the cluster. For more information, see Operations Manual → Seed a cluster.

Analytics cluster

To upgrade an analytics cluster, that is, a cluster with a single primary for system and one or more system secondaries (using the setting server.cluster.system_database_mode), it is important to upgrade the secondaries before you upgrade the primary. If not, the primary automatically updates the system database, and the secondaries are no longer compatible. Similarly to in-place rolling upgrades, the steps for an individual server are identical to upgrading a standalone server.