Building

Neo4j is built using Maven - http://maven.apache.org/

Maven 3 is now supported

Contributing

For helping out improving Neo4j, check out the intro on contributing code.

Requirements

At least as of Neo4j 1.7 and OpenJDK 1.7.0_147-icedtea, OpenJDK 7 is unable to build Neo4j with following error: java.lang.AssertionError: Missing type variable in where clause T. Please use JDK 6 (OpenJDK is fine) to build Neo4j.

In addition, you need to allow enough memory to the Maven build process, for example by adding before launching Maven:

export JAVA_OPTS='-Xms384M -Xmx512M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M'

At least on OpenJDK 1.6.0_23, building Neo4j with the default settings throws misleading exceptions such as: (reproduced here for your information)

[ERROR] Specifications.java:[178,33] cannot find symbol
symbol  : method and(java.lang.Iterable<java.lang.Object>)
location: class org.neo4j.helpers.Specifications
[ERROR] Iterables.java:[342,63] <FROM,TO>map(
	org.neo4j.helpers.Function<? super FROM,? extends TO>,
	java.lang.Iterable<FROM>) in org.neo4j.helpers.collection.Iterables
	cannot be applied to (<anonymous org.neo4j.helpers.Function<java.lang.Iterable<T>,
	java.util.Iterator<T>>>,java.lang.Iterable<java.lang.Object>)

Build Steps Community:

git clone git://github.com/neo4j/community.git
mvn clean install

To build all of the Neo4j Distribution

These instructions are for OS X, with https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew installed.

prepare the repo:

rm -rf ~/.m2/repository/org/neo4j
mkdir build
cd build

build community:

git clone git@github.com:neo4j/community.git
cd community
git pull origin master
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
cd ..

build advanced

git clone git@github.com:neo4j/advanced.git
cd advanced
git pull origin master
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
cd ..

build enterprise

git clone git@github.com:neo4j/enterprise.git
cd enterprise
git pull origin master
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
cd ..

install the ASCIIDOC toolchain

brew install docbook asciidoc w3m fop graphviz && sudo docbook-register

build the manual

git clone git@github.com:neo4j/manual.git
cd manual
git pull origin master
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
cd ..

Build the standalone distributions

git clone git@github.com:neo4j/packaging.git
cd packaging
git pull origin master
cd standalone
mvn clean package

Working with the source code in Eclipse IDE