README.md

Neo4J

Human Connection is a social network. Using a graph based database which can model nodes and edges natively - a network - feels like an obvious choice. We decided to use Neo4j, the currently most used graph database available. The community edition of Neo4J is Free and Open Source and we try our best to keep our application compatible with the community edition only.

Installation With Docker

Run:

docker-compose up

You can access Neo4J through http://localhost:7474/ for an interactive cypher shell and a visualization of the graph.

Installation Without Docker

Install the community edition of Neo4j along with the plugin Apoc on your system.

To do so, go to releases, choose "Community Server", download the installation files for you operation system and unpack the files.

Download Neo4j Apoc and drop the .jar file into the plugins folder of the just extracted Neo4j-Server.

Then make sure to allow Apoc procedures by adding the following line to your Neo4j configuration (conf/neo4j.conf):

dbms.security.procedures.unrestricted=apoc.*

Alternatives

You can download Neo4j Desktop and run locally for development, spin up a hosted Neo4j Sandbox instance, run Neo4j in one of the many cloud options, spin up Neo4j in a Docker container, on Arch linux you can install neo4j-community from AUR or on Debian-based systems install Neo4j from the Debian Repository. Just be sure to update the Neo4j connection string and credentials accordingly in backend/.env.

Start Neo4J and confirm the database is running at http://localhost:7474.

Commands

Here we describe some rarely used Cypher commands for Neo4j that are needed from time to time:

Index And Constraint Commands

If indexes or constraints are missing or not set correctly, the browser search will not work or the database seed for development will not work.

The indexes and constraints of our database are set in backend/src/db/migrate/store.js. This is where the magic happens.

It's called by our prod:migrate init command. This command initializes the Admin user and creates all necessary indexes and constraints in the Neo4j database.

Calls in development

Locally without Docker:

# in backend folder
$ yarn prod:migrate init

Locally with Docker:

# in main folder
$ docker compose exec backend yarn prod:migrate init

Calls in production

Locally with Docker:

# in main folder
$ docker compose exec backend /bin/sh -c "yarn prod:migrate init"

On a server with Kubernetes cluster:

# tested for one backend replica
# !!! be aware of the kubectl context !!!
$ kubectl -n default exec -it $(kubectl -n default get pods | grep ocelot-backend | awk '{ print $1 }') -- /bin/sh -c "yarn prod:migrate init"

Cypher commands to show indexes and constraints

# in browser command line or cypher shell

# show all indexes and constraints
$ :schema

# show all indexes
$ CALL db.indexes();

# show all constraints
$ CALL db.constraints();

Cypher commands to create and drop indexes and constraints

# in browser command line or cypher shell

# create indexes
$ CALL db.index.fulltext.createNodeIndex("post_fulltext_search",["Post"],["title", "content"]);
$ CALL db.index.fulltext.createNodeIndex("user_fulltext_search",["User"],["name", "slug"]);
$ CALL db.index.fulltext.createNodeIndex("tag_fulltext_search",["Tag"],["id"]);

# drop an index
$ DROP CONSTRAINT ON ( image:Image ) ASSERT image.url IS UNIQUE

# drop all indexes and constraints
$ CALL apoc.schema.assert({},{},true) YIELD label, key RETURN * ;