Accessing Neo4j from the command line using the Neo4j shell

Often, you will find yourself in the need of firing simple Neo4j operations, either to create a node or delete a node, query the total number of nodes, or to poke into the Neo4j graph database. With Neo4j, this can easily be done through the command-line interface.

Neo4j can also be accessed from the command line like the Unix shell. Although it is less likely that this mode is going to be used in production, it's very handy when it comes to development and debugging. In this recipe and the next recipe, we will explore the two ways to connect to Neo4j from the command-line interface, which are using the Neo4j shell and curl.

In this recipe, we will learn how to connect to Neo4j from the command-line interface.

Getting ready

Neo4j ships with a command-line client called the Neo4j shell. The Neo4j shell is a fully featured interactive shell that supports line editing, history, and various help options. Using man followed by a Neo4j command...