Using Neo4j from Python

This guide provides an overview of how to connecting to Neo4j from Python.

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 and Python

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.

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Building Neo4j Applications with Python

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

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Neo4j Python Driver

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

Support for Python 2 was removed in the 2.0 release of the driver.

pip install neo4j

from neo4j import GraphDatabase

class HelloWorldExample:

    def __init__(self, uri, user, password):
        self.driver = GraphDatabase.driver(uri, auth=(user, password))

    def close(self):
        self.driver.close()

    def print_greeting(self, message):
        with self.driver.session() as session:
            greeting = session.execute_write(self._create_and_return_greeting, message)
            print(greeting)

    @staticmethod
    def _create_and_return_greeting(tx, message):
        result = tx.run("CREATE (a:Greeting) "
                        "SET a.message = $message "
                        "RETURN a.message + ', from node ' + id(a)", message=message)
        return result.single()[0]


if __name__ == "__main__":
    greeter = HelloWorldExample("bolt://localhost:7687", "neo4j", "password")
    greeter.print_greeting("hello, world")
    greeter.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 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

5.12.0

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.

Resources

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