Single node installation of Neo4j over Mac OS X

Neo4j is a highly scalable graph database that runs over all the common platforms; it can be used as in a mode and can also be embedded inside applications. The following recipe will show you how to set up a single instance of Neo4j over the OS X operating system.

Getting ready

Perform the following steps to get started with this recipe:

• Download the binary version of Neo4j from http://www.neo4j.org/download for the Mac OS X platform and the community edition, as shown in the following command:

  $ wget  http://dist.neo4j.org/neo4j-community-2.2.0-M02-unix.tar.gz
  

• Check whether Java is installed for the operating system or not by typing this over the cmd prompt:

  $ echo $JAVA_HOME
  

  If this command throws no output, install JDK/JRE for your Mac OS X distribution and also set the JAVA_HOME path

How to do it...

Now, let's install Neo4j over the OS X operating system, which is very simple, as shown in the following steps:

1. Extract the TAR file using the following command:

   $ tar –zxvf neo4j-community-<version>-unix.tar.gz
   $ ls
   

2. Go to the bin directory under the root folder:

   $ cd <neo4j-community-version>/bin/
   

3. Start the Neo4j graph database server:

   $ ./neo4j start
   

4. Check whether Neo4j is running or not by using the following command:

   $ ./neo4j status
   

How it works...

Neo4j comes with prebuilt binaries over the OS X operating system, which can be extracted and run over. Neo4j comes with both web-based and terminal-based consoles, over which the Neo4j graph database can be explored.

There's more…

Neo4j over Mac OS X can also be installed using brew, which has been explained here.

Run the following commands over the shell:

$ brew update
$ brew install neo4j

After this, Neo4j can be started by using the start option with the Neo4j command:

$ neo4j start

This will start the Neo4j server, which can be accessed from the default URL (http://localhost:7474).

The installation can be reached by using the following commands:

$ cd /usr/local/Cellar/neo4j/
$ cd {NEO4J_VERSION}/libexec/

You can learn more about OS X installation from http://neo4j.com/docs/stable/server-installation.html#osx-install.