Neo4j Drivers and Integration

To build applications with Neo4j, you use official drivers that communicate with the database over the Bolt protocol. Neo4j provides drivers for all major programming languages.

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The Bolt Protocol

Bolt is Neo4j's binary protocol, optimised for graph database communication:

Feature	Description
Binary format	Efficient serialisation (faster than HTTP/JSON)
Connection pooling	Reuses connections for better performance
Encryption	TLS by default on AuraDB
Port	7687 (default)

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Official Drivers

Language	Package
JavaScript / TypeScript	neo4j-driver
Python	neo4j
Java	org.neo4j.driver:neo4j-java-driver
.NET (C#)	Neo4j.Driver
Go	github.com/neo4j/neo4j-go-driver

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JavaScript / TypeScript

Installation

npm install neo4j-driver

Connection

const neo4j = require('neo4j-driver');

const driver = neo4j.driver(
  'neo4j://localhost:7687',
  neo4j.auth.basic('neo4j', 'your-password')
);

// Verify connectivity
await driver.verifyConnectivity();
console.log('Connected to Neo4j');

Running queries

const session = driver.session();

try {
  // Read query
  const result = await session.executeRead(async (tx) => {
    return tx.run(
      'MATCH (p:Person {name: $name}) RETURN p',
      { name: 'Alice' }
    );
  });