How to use bolt protocol to access your Neo4j Database – bolt://localhost:7687

It seems like the question of how to use the bolt protocol (or HTTP) with Neo4j is super common amongst newer Neo4j developers, especially when it produces errors, and it is most often searched by the phrase bolt://localhost:7687 or http://localhost:7474, or “Neo4j 7474”, or “Neo4j url”, especially when moving from Neo4j local access to Neo4j remote access (e.g. over network, in which case developers seem to search for “neo4j remote access bolt”).

COMMON ERROR: Accessing bolt://localhost:7687

Many times if a developer is trying to access Neo4j, they can get an error like this as they attempt to swap out bolt and HTTP/REST protocols in the URL, and that is usually because they use different default ports (see next section):

Exception in thread "main" org.neo4j.driver.v1.exceptions.ClientException: Unsupported URI scheme: http
    at org.neo4j.driver.internal.DriverFactory.createDriver(DriverFactory.java:125)
    at org.neo4j.driver.internal.DriverFactory.newInstance(DriverFactory.java:82)
    at org.neo4j.driver.v1.GraphDatabase.driver(GraphDatabase.java:136)
    at org.neo4j.driver.v1.GraphDatabase.driver(GraphDatabase.java:119)
    at org.neo4j.driver.v1.GraphDatabase.driver(GraphDatabase.java:94)
    at neo4j.Neo4j.<init>(Neo4j.java:19)
    at neo4j.Neo4j.main(Neo4j.java:50)

CORRECT SYNTAX: To Use Bolt Protocol to Access your Neo4j DB

There are actually two main ways to access your Neo4j database through the bolt protocol, or through HTTP/REST. They each use a different port, and here are syntax examples for each, with the correct ports:

• HTTP/REST: default Neo4j http port is 7474
  • Neo4j URL syntax for HTTP / REST: http://localhost:7474 / rest://localhost:7474
• BOLT: default Neo4j bolt port is 7687
  • Neo4j bolt URL syntax: bolt://localhost:7687

SOLUTION: For Accessing a Neo4j Database Over the Network

By default Neo4j is configured to simply listen on local, so almost always for Neo4j remote access, if you are unable to connect (and if you are using the correct port as described above) the issue is that there is a single line that is commented out in the neo4j.conf file. All you have to do is uncomment the following line, and it should work.

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