Neo4j is new to me. I have a backup of neo4j database and I would like to build a docker container by creating a database by using that backup.
I know I can use neo4j-admin restore --from=<backup-directory> [--database=<name>] [--force[=<true|false>]]
command but am looking for something which a docker container would be able to use to recreate database when the container is created.
The documentation of the neo4j docker image uses an exiting database database inside container. But I need to restore a backup and create database from it.
EXTENSION_SCRIPT official image hook
Neo4j's official image provides a hook so you can load data on startup. For that, you must define an environment variable named EXTENSION_SCRIPT
at runtime, which points to your database restore script to run (See https://neo4j.com/developer/docker-23/).
Here is an example using docker-compose (this could also be done with a Dockerfile):
docker-compose.yml file :
version: '2'
services:
neo4j:
image: neo4j:3.2
ports:
- "7474:7474"
- "7687:7687"
environment:
- EXTENSION_SCRIPT=/neo4j-data/neo4j-init.sh :
volumes:
- ./neo4j-data:/neo4j-data
Then, in your initialization script, you must restore the database once, the first time
neo4j-init.sh file :
#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
IFS=$'\n\t'
# do not run init script at each container strat but only at the first start
if [ ! -f /tmp/neo4j-import-done.flag ]; then
/var/lib/neo4j/bin/neo4j-admin neo4j-admin restore --from=<backup-directory mount as a docker volume under /neo4j-data> [--database=<name>] [--force[=<true|false>]]
touch /tmp/neo4j-import-done.flag
else
echo "The import has already been made."
fi