Neo4j Server Maven Plugin

It may get hard to update the existing neo4j-maven-plugin and make it use the latest versions of Neo4j, because it depends on deprecated classes, which are very likely to be moved to some internal packages in the future.

So I decided to write another small Maven plugin, that simply downloads the complete Neo4j server artifact, and runs it, as a user would do it, using ./neo4j start

Furthermore it provides an idiomatic way to configure the server using the plugin <configuration> section.

WARNING: Since version 2.0, this works with Neo4j version >= 4.x and Java 11.

Building the project

mvn clean install

Usage

start

mvn neo4j-server:start

stop

mvn neo4j-server:stop

Integration Testing

The start/stop goals bind by default to lifecycle phases pre- and post-integration-test:

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.github.harti2006</groupId>
    <artifactId>neo4j-server-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>SEE-THE-POM-OR-RELEASE</version>
    <configuration>
        <port>${neo4j.server.port}</port>
        <version>${neo4j.server.version}</version>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>start-neo4j-server</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>start</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
        <execution>
            <id>stop-neo4j-server</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>stop</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

For an example, run

cd integration-tests
mvn clean verify

Parameters

Have a look at the Neo4jServerMojoSupport class for details.

Code Formatting

File formatting is verified by EditorConfig during mvn verify step. Most errors can be fixed with mvn editorconfig:format task.

Releases

The release process is copied frome this blog post:

• Snapshot releases to Maven Central are performed automatically by Travis CI on every push to master.
• Final releases to Maven Central are performed automatically by Travis CI after creating and pushing a git tag.

Troubleshooting

Windows

While we don't officially support Windows, we have done some tests with it and debugged the code to see the plug-in running at least once.

Based on that, we understand you might need (re)install the Neo4j service, before the Neo4j plug-in is able to start/stop the Neo4j server. The best way to do so should be:

1. Run a Maven build against a project that starts the plug-in (mvn verify or mvn install). Likely, the first time you'll get an error, but you'll also get the working Neo4j server under <your-project>\target\neo4j.server\neo4j-community-4.4.1.
2. cd under that directory and issue: bin\neo4j install-service
3. Then, try to start the Neo4j manually (bin\neo4j start). If you can reach the server via the browser
   (eg, http://localhost/7474), now you should be able to build the project and get the Neo4j plug-in working.

• If install-service doesn't work, try update-service, or the more brutal: uninstall-service + install-service.
• Notice that Windows keeps popping up dialogs to confirm of all the service-related operations above, even after service installation and regular use of the plug-in. We have no idea if this can be disabled for the Neo4j service only (it can for all the apps, but highly non recommended).