Neo4j

What is Neo4j?

Neo4j is a native graph database: data is stored as nodes and relationships rather than rows or documents, which makes it well-suited for highly connected data (social graphs, recommendation engines, fraud detection). Laradock runs it straight from the official neo4j image with no custom Dockerfile.

Start Neo4j

docker compose up -d neo4j

It runs as its own container with no depends_on in compose.yml.

Stop Neo4j

docker compose stop neo4j

This stops the container without deleting its data. Data persists under DATA_PATH_HOST/neo4j/data, and logs under DATA_PATH_HOST/neo4j/logs.

Configuration

There is no neo4j/defaults.env file for this service, everything is hardcoded directly in neo4j/compose.yml:

Setting	Value	What it does
Image	neo4j:latest	Not version-pinned or overridable via .env; edit compose.yml directly to change it.
NEO4J_AUTH	none	Authentication is disabled entirely, no username/password is required to connect.
Host port 7401	→ container 7474	Neo4j Browser (HTTP UI).
Host port 7402	→ container 7687	Bolt protocol port, used by drivers/apps.

If you need a pinned version, authentication enabled, or different ports, you'll need to edit neo4j/compose.yml yourself, there's currently no .env-driven way to change these.

Open the Neo4j Browser

With the container running, open http://localhost:7401. Since NEO4J_AUTH=none, you can connect without entering credentials.

Connect from your app

Use the Bolt protocol on the mapped port: bolt://localhost:7402 from your host machine, or bolt://neo4j:7687 from inside another Laradock container.

Common issues

• No authentication by default. NEO4J_AUTH=none means anyone who can reach the port has full access. Fine for local dev; edit compose.yml to set real credentials (e.g. NEO4J_AUTH=neo4j/yourpassword) before exposing it anywhere less trusted.
• Can't change the version via .env. Unlike most other Laradock services, the Neo4j image tag isn't parameterized, edit the image: line in neo4j/compose.yml directly and run docker compose pull neo4j (or rebuild) afterward.
• Port already in use on your host. Another service is bound to 7401 or 7402. Edit the port mapping in neo4j/compose.yml since there's no env var for it.
• App can't connect but the container is running. Confirm the app's config uses neo4j (the container name) and port 7687 from inside other Laradock containers, not localhost, which only works from your host machine.

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Need a wide-column store instead? See Cassandra. For the full list of services, see Getting Started.