Installing Neo4j on Mac or Linux

Downloading Neo4j for the Mac or Linux platforms is very similar. The Neo4j website will automatically detect your platform and start downloading the appropriate version:

The only major difference in the download process, however, is in the fact that the Java run-time is not bundled with the downloaded files. On Windows, as we saw previously, there is no need to install anything but the Neo4j installer. On macOS X and Linux, however, you need to make sure that Java 7 is installed and configured to be used as the default Java Virtual Machine. In this book, we will assume that you know how to do this; if not, you may want to search for Neo4j Java 7 OS X using a browser to find the required articles to solve this.

I will be using Linux as my home operating system, but the process should be almost identical on OS X.

First, you start by downloading the file that contains Neo4j, as shown in the following screenshot:

Next, you just need to decompress the download in a location of your preference. You can do that with a graphical tool (just double-click on the compressed file) or using the command-line utility that ships with your OS X or Linux distribution. In any case, you will get a file structure similar to the one shown in the following screenshot:

Next, you should open a Terminal in the directory highlighted in the preceding screenshot. By running a simple command (bin/neo4j start), you will start Neo4j at the default location:

Accessing Neo4j's browser is completely analogous to the Windows installation illustrated previously; all you need to do is point your browser to http://localhost:7474 and you should be good to go, having the Neo4j browser in your browser.

The default installation of Neo4j also comes with some tutorials and a simple dataset that you can play around with. Hopefully, this is enough to get you going; it certainly is enough for this chapter of the book.