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Introduction

About

Neo4j-Migrations are a set of tools to make your schema migrations as easy as possible. They provide a uniform way for applications, the command line and build tools alike to track, manage and apply changes to your database, in short: to refactor your database. The project is inspired to a large extent by FlywayDB, which is an awesome tool for migration of relational databases. Most things evolve around Cypher scripts, however the Core API of Neo4j-Migrations allows defining Java classes as migrations as well.

Neo4j-Migrations builds directly on top of the official Neo4j Java driver, supports Neo4j 3.5, Neo4j 4.1 to 4.4 and Neo4j 5, including enterprise features such as multidatabase support and impersonation.

The only dependencies are said driver and ClassGraph, the latter being used to find migrations on the classpath.

The history of migrations applied is stored as a subgraph in your database.

Compatibility

Neo4j-Migrations is tested only against Neo4j, the world’s leading Graph database. Neo4j-Migrations requires a 5.2+ version of Neo4j Java Driver. Therefore, Neo4j-Migrations works with Neo4j 3.5, 4.1 - 4.4, 5 and of course, Neo4j-Aura. It also can be used with an embedded instance, as long as the embedded instances provides the Bolt-Connector, too. The tooling may or may not work with other databases using the Bolt protocol. We don’t provide any support for those.

The Core API and the JVM based version of the CLI module of Neo4j-Migrations requires at least Java 17 or higher since version 2.0. Neo4j-Migrations can safely be used on both the class- and module-path. Native binaries are provided for 64bit versions of macOS, Linux and Windows. The native binaries don’t require a JVM to be installed.

For a version compatible with JDK 8, check the 1.x releases. We still do maintain the latest minor, including support for older versions of Spring Boot (prio to Spring Boot 3). These are also the versions you should be using against Neo4j 4.0.

The older releases of Neo4j-Migrations are compiled with JDK 17 while targeting JDK 8. The Core API is provided as a Multi-Release-Jar in the older releases, providing a module-info.java for JDK 11 and higher, making it a good citizen on the Java module path as well.

Versions

Neo4j-Migrations 1.0.0 has been considered stable and was first released in November 2021. Since then, we ensure semantic versioning. This means in cases where you use the Java API directly, you can be sure that patch releases won’t break your application, and you can always upgrade.

Modules

Neo4j-Migrations comes in different flavors:

Core

The core module, providing an API to run both Cypher script and Java-based migrations. The API includes builders for configuration. Of course, Neo4j-Migrations works on the module path, and it also has an explicit, correct module definition with a clear API boundary. In addition, we do make use of sealed interfaces for things that are meant to be implemented only by us.

JavaDoc and Project info

CLI

A command line tool that supports every interaction that the core module provides. Native binaries are available for Linux, macOS and Windows. If you want to use Java-based migrations in the CLI, you must use the JVM distribution. This is an ideal tool to be put into CI/CD not based on Maven or Gradle.

Spring-Boot-Starter

Provides all configuration options via the well-known Spring-Boot-Properties mechanism and turns them into a fully configured Migrations instance that will be applied on application start. Scripts will be searched sane default location.

JavaDoc and Project info

Quarkus

An extension for Quarkus, providing full integration of all configuration option via Quarkus' configuration. Creates a startup observer that applies all resolved migrations at startup.

JavaDoc and Project info

Maven-Plugin

A Maven-plugin that hooks clean, apply and verify operations into the appropriate Maven lifecycles. Use this to apply migrations during your build.

Plugin info

Changelog

We provide a full changelog on GitHub: Neo4j-Migrations. Our commits follow conventional commits. The releases are created and published via JReleaser.

History

The original idea of Neo4j-Migrations was conceived when working on integrating Spring Data Neo4j (back then SDN/RX) into JHipster. We needed some Nodes, constraints and relationship to be present in the Neo4j database for JHipster to do it’s magic but back then there was no lightweight (in terms of dependencies) tool that did work well with Neo4j 4.0 (the first Graph database providing reactive data access out of the box). Neo4j-Migrations filled that gap in early 2020 and has grown ever since.