Dockerizing a Neo4j instance with an extension

In this post I will demonstrate how to setup a Neo4j container with an existing database and a custom extension that synchronizes data with an Elastic Search instance. The extension I am using is a fork of this project on GitHub.

To get started, pull the 2.3.2 tag of Neo4j image. Some functionality I will explain later in the post depend on this version (and up).

Adding volumes

Volumes are a way to persist data across several invocations of a container by mapping directories from the host file system to the container. For this Neo4j instance, I will need to add three volume definitions.

  1. data volume: This is the data folder inside neo4j installation which containing the graph.db directory which actually holds the database files.
  2. plugins volume: the elastic search extension has some jar files that should go to the plugins folder of Neo4j.
  3. extension volume: This is my custom volume that contains a script file to be run before Neo4j starts. Note that this mapping will create a new directory in the Neo4j container. Therefore, it is important to select a directory name that will not break anything in the installation.

Before-Start Hook

With 2.3.2 Neo4j image, I can use EXTENSION_SCRIPT environment variable to specify a script file to execute before Neo4j starts. The Elastic Search extension needs two parameters to be set in neo4j.properties file, so I will create a script that concatenates two lines to the end of the file.

I know that Neo4j is installed in /var/lib/neo4j and it is OK to create a directory named extension. So, my command looks like this:

As a bonus, I can add service definitions for Neo4j and Elastic Search in a docker-compose file for easier networking and maintainability.

Now, running docker-compose with --x-networking flag will create two containers with container_name as their host names.

As a second bonus, I can modify my extension script to make sure the Elastic Search container starts before Neo4j does, so that I will not get any Connection Refused errors on startup.



In this post, I showed how to setup a Neo4j instance with access to an Elastic Search service over the Docker network. For any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch by writing a comment below or sending me a tweet @ahmetkizilay. Enjoy!

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