installing neo4j on aws

first of all, we’re installing the latest and greatest (neo4j v3.2). In order to do this, I went to the project documentation found here.

prerequisites

first, we need us some java 8. I decided to go with my trust ol’ debian environment (see aws install instructions here). At the time of writing, the newest version supported was still jessie, so I went with that.

Fortunately, I’m not the first person to ever install java 8 on debian jessie, so instructions were already readily available from neo4j. Not too shabby.

Just a quick heads up, though: I was unable to get the command

apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk

to run successfully even after adding it to my apt sources files. Perhaps this was my fault. The way I dealt with this, eventually, was by being explicit about the targeted version (i.e. demanding we install the backports library, because apparently there was a non-backports version available for me in the default package repositories?). In any case, the working command was

apt-get install -t jessie-backports openjdk-8-jdk

where, above, the jessie-backports above was the alias given to the backports repo url in my apt sources file (per the neo4j site instructions).

Confusingly, I had to open more than just the http and https ports – I also had to open the bolt port, as that was used for the web interfact (this is spelled out very clearly in the documentation, but why read documentation when you canjust yolo?).