Using Neo4j from Go

Goals

If you are a Go developer, this guide provides an overview of options for connecting to Neo4j. While this guide is not comprehensive it will introduce the different drivers and link to the relevant resources.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with graph database concepts and the property graph model. You should have installed Neo4j and made yourself familiar with our Cypher Query language.

Intermediate

Neo4j for Go Developers

You can use the official driver for Go (neo4j-go-driver) or connect via Bolt or HTTP with any of our community drivers.

Neo4j Go Driver

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

Module version

Make sure your application has been setup to use go modules (there should be a go.mod file in your application root). Add the driver with:

go mod edit -require github.com/neo4j/neo4j-go-driver@<the tag>

With `go get`

Add the driver with

go get github.com/neo4j/neo4j-go-driver/neo4j

func helloWorld(uri, username, password string, encrypted bool) (string, error) {
	driver, err := neo4j.NewDriver(uri, neo4j.BasicAuth(username, password, ""), func(c *neo4j.Config) {
		c.Encrypted = encrypted
	})
	if err != nil {
		return "", err
	}
	defer driver.Close()

	session, err := driver.Session(neo4j.AccessModeWrite)
	if err != nil {
		return "", err
	}
	defer session.Close()

	greeting, err := session.WriteTransaction(func(transaction neo4j.Transaction) (interface{}, error) {
		result, err := transaction.Run(
			"CREATE (a:Greeting) SET a.message = $message RETURN a.message + ', from node ' + id(a)",
			map[string]interface{}{"message": "hello, world"})
		if err != nil {
			return nil, err
		}

		if result.Next() {
			return result.Record().GetByIndex(0), nil
		}

		return nil, result.Err()
	})
	if err != nil {
		return "", err
	}

	return greeting.(string), nil
}

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 Causal 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+scc`	`neo4j+scc`	`bolt+scc`
Neo4j Aura	`neo4j+s`	N/A	N/A

There is more information on Driver connection URI’s in the Drivers Manual.

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

1.8

The Neo4j Team

Neo4j Online Community

Docs

API

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.

Neo4j Community Drivers

Members of the each programming language community have invested a lot of time and love to develop each one of the community drivers for Neo4j, so if you use any one of them, please provide feedback to the authors.

The community drivers have been graciously contributed by the Neo4j community. Many of them are fully featured and well-maintained, but some may not be. Neo4j does not take any responsibility for their usability.

Golang Neo4J Bolt Driver

This implementation attempts to follow the best practices as per the Bolt specification, but also implements compatibility with Golang’s sql.driver interface.

It is recommended that you use the Neo4j Bolt-specific interfaces if possible. The implementation is more efficient and can more closely support the Neo4j Bolt feature set.

Features