SSH tunnel my Neo4j graph database

Question

Attempting to set up an ssh tunnel from my neo4j 3.2.3 graph database from my AWS EC2 instance to my local machine. Tried setting it up like I do for tunneling jupyter notebooks, but it looks like neo4j is blocking authentication or something.

So far I've attempted to change my neo4j.conf file on my (remote) EC2 instance according to online research:

# Whether requests to Neo4j are authenticated.
# To disable authentication, uncomment this line
dbms.security.auth_enabled=false

# With default configuration Neo4j only accepts local connections.
# To accept non-local connections, uncomment this line:
dbms.connectors.default_listen_address=0.0.0.0

# HTTPS Connector. There can be zero or one HTTPS connectors.
dbms.connector.https.enabled=true
dbms.connector.https.listen_address=0.0.0.0:7473
#dbms.connector.https.address=0.0.0.0:7473

And on my local machine I setup an ssh tunnel like I would for a jupyter notebook tunnel (which I have successfully setup already for this same EC2 instance): ssh -NfL localhost:7474:localhost:7474 project <-- 7474 being the port neo4j is running on at my remote machine's local port

When I try opening the browser on my local machine at localhost:7474, I'm getting the welcome screen of the Neo4j browser, but it's not letting my sign in to the db. Instead, I get a "WebSocket connection failure".

It's autofilling the Host: to use bolt://localhost:7687 which I'm unfamiliar with. Entering username and password as well (which have been entered correctly).

Anyone know how to successfully ssh tunnel a neo4j (version 3.2.3) database to a local machine?

Answer 1

In you config it is using port 7473 but in your tunnel you're using 7474. It couldn't be this simple, could it? :)

Answer 2

Neo4J basically operates a ton of different ports: the 7474 is your web port for the HTTP, but it also runs "bolt" on a different port: usually 7687. This is also a TCP port, so you need to ssh tunnel that as well.

ssh -NfL localhost:7474:localhost:7474 -L localhost:7687:localhost:7687 project

should fix it for you. You may have to configure the port for bolt in your neo4j config