running neo4j in a machine with java 1.6

Question

I am trying to run neo4j for the first time.

In my RHEL 6 machine, I have Java 1.6 installed. I do not want to change that because other programs are using that. When I tried to run neo4j, downloaded from here , I got the error: ERROR! Neo4j cannot be started using java version 1.6.0_24. Please use Oracle(R) Java(TM) 7. ERROR! Neo4j cannot be started using java version 1.6.0_24. Please use Oracle(R) Java(TM) 7. ERROR! Neo4j cannot be started using java version 1.6.0_24. Please use Oracle(R) Java(TM) 7. Clearly, I need to install JAVA 7. I was wondering if I can just download Java 7 and let neo4j know the path to java executables.

Answer 1

Set the JAVA_HOME and PATH before starting the neo4j server.

set the path on the terminal.

export JAVA_HOME=/home/jdk/jdk1.7.0_45
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

then start the neo4j or you can create a bash script to do this automatically.

Answer 2

The different major versions are normally different packages (eg, java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel ) that go in different directories (usually in /opt ), and you can set the JAVA_HOME and/or JDK_HOME environment variables in your startup script. That said, there's rarely any harm in running your programs on the version 7 JVM (just like you can upgrade the kernel without touching your installed programs), and Java 6 is EOL and won't get new security updates.

Answer 3

neo4j 2.0.2 uses java7 it seems and hence requires jdk7.

Go to neo4j website and download 1.8.3 version

http://dist.neo4j.org/neo4j-community-1.8.3-unix.tar.gz

and if you have java 1.6.45 in ubuntu, you are done

untar and copy to /opt and issue the below command from neo4j root directory

sudo ./bin/neo4j start