Cannot Access Database Created with Neo4j Embedded Server on Neo4j Standalone Server

Question

• I have a Neo4j database that I initially created using the Neo4j Ruby gem, which uses the embedded server.
• In order to deploy my database and accompanying app on Heroku, I need to use Neo4j standalone server's Rest API.
• I have tried to switch on my development machine by installing Neo4j server through Homebrew. I edited the libexec/conf/neo4j-server.properties file to point it to the embedded database.
• I can start Neo4j server fine, but, when I use the web interface to browse the database, none of my nodes are visible-- only the root node
• I know that the server is looking at the correct directory because I can see the correct path in the configuration section of the web interface.
• I know the data is still in the database because I can access it from my original Ruby app using the embedded server.

What could be the problem?

Answer 1

I suspect the problem is an issue with relative/absolute paths, meaning you might think it points to the right directory but actually it created an empty database somewhere else. If that's the case, just change your directory settings. As a temporary fix, you can always keep the default settings and just copy your embedded db into the data/graph.db folder. That always works for me.

Checking your path, the thing you need to look for is a leading slash. A leading slash indicates an absolute path, whereas the lack of one indicates a path relative to the main server directory which is the directory that contains conf, bin, data, ... Also, if you typed in the line yourself, check for typos. The correct syntax is:

org.neo4j.server.database.location=/this/is/an/absolute/path

or else this :

org.neo4j.server.database.location=this/is/a/relative/path