Getting Started In One Minute Guide

From Neo4j Wiki

This is a compressed summary of the slightly more verbose Getting Started Guide. Please refer to the full guide if something here is unclear.

• If you don't use Maven: Download the Neo4j release and add the Neo4j kernel and JTA jars to your classpath.

• If you do use Maven: Check the Maven2 info here and add it to your pom.xml.

• If you want some commonly used Neo4j components bundled right away, check out the Getting Started With Apoc guide before downloading/configuring anything.

• Declare your relationship types and start Neo4j (the complete code is here: One Minute Guide Complete Code):

public enum MyRelationshipTypes implements RelationshipType
{
    KNOWS
}
...
GraphDatabaseService graphDb = new EmbeddedGraphDatabase( "var/base" ); 

• Create a small graph:

Node firstNode = graphDb.createNode();
Node secondNode = graphDb.createNode();
Relationship relationship = firstNode.createRelationshipTo( secondNode, MyRelationshipTypes.KNOWS );

firstNode.setProperty( "message", "Hello, " );
secondNode.setProperty( "message", "world!" );
relationship.setProperty( "message", "brave Neo4j " );

• Recall that Neo4j is fully transactional, so wrap everything in transactions:

Transaction tx = graphDb.beginTx();
try
{
   // all Neo4j operations that work with the graph, for example:
   // Node firstNode = graphDb.createNode();
   // ... etc ...
   tx.success();
}
finally
{
   tx.finish();
   graphDb.shutdown();
}

• Print the result and you're done:

System.out.print( firstNode.getProperty( "message" ) );
System.out.print( relationship.getProperty( "message" ) );
System.out.print( secondNode.getProperty( "message" ) );

Now, you can move on to more detailed information:

• the verbose version of this guide

• the complete code

• the javadocs at http://api.neo4j.org/current

• the basic code snippets PDF to learn the traverser framework

• the guide to the Shell

• the documentation page

Finally, be sure to sign up on the mailing list.