Talking to Neo4j running on OSX from Windows7

This is not a deep diving article but just a brain dump.  Maybe it will help someone.  At least it works on my machine.

I wanted to use Neo4j with dotnet.  So I put Neo4j as a server on the Mac and my regular dotnet stuff on a Win7 machine running through Parallels.

I don’t remember exactly what was needed to get Neo4j up and running but it was easy I recall.  Download.  Extract.  Find the right folder.  Type “neo4j start”. Open a browser.  Type “localhost:7474”.  Create a node.  Check it was created.  Done.
I opted for running Neo4j stand alone to keep my machine tidy – starting the Neo4j server every time I develop is easy.

Since I want to talk to Neo4j from another machine I need to bridge the network and open the firewall on the mac.  It’s just a google away even though the way to open the firewall seems to shifts with every OSX release.  To the better in my case.

A caveat that burned some time for me was that the admin GUI for Neo4j is set to only answer on localhost.  It is considered a good thing since there is no usr/pwd.  That is solved by updating the config and restarting the Neo4j server. Use http://yourmachine:7474 to check this.

On the Windows/Visual studio/Dotnet side I opted for Neo4jclient since it is under present development and open source.  The 2 top hits I found otherwise had their last update set in 2010.  It’s an easy install with Nuget.

Creating nodes from dotnet was easy.  I just followed the getting started.

That’s all I’ve done for now.

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