neo4j – Neo4j Service Won’t Start with Imported Database on Debian

debianneo4j

I've been playing around with neo4j recently on my Debian 7.8 install. It's awesome!

Today I imported around 100000 nodes and 75000 relationships using neo4j-import tool. I stopped the neo4j service and copied the imported database to /var/lib/neo4j/data/graph.db – but now Neo4j service won't start

Starting Neo4j Server...WARNING: not changing user
process [4963]... waiting for server to be ready....... Failed to start within 120 seconds.
Neo4j Server may have failed to start, please check the logs.

Which is weird because it doesn't wait 120 seconds to start – 5 at most. The only log that is produced is console.log in /var/log/neo4j

2015-07-01 00:10:24.363+0000 INFO  [API] Setting startup timeout to: 120000ms based on 120000
2015-07-01 00:10:26.501+0000 INFO  [API] Successfully shutdown Neo4j Server.

which isn't very useful. When I remove the database, neo4j is able to start. I copied graph.db to my windows installation and it works well, I can search through nodes etc. so perhaps it has something to do with configuration on my Debian? I added a line in /etc/neo4j/neo4j-server.properties

 org.neo4j.server.startup_timeout=0

but this changed nothing, service start still times out after several seconds. Any ideas?

Here's graph.db messages.log – nothing gets appended when I try to start the service

2015-07-01 01:58:12.142+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Import starting
2015-07-01 01:58:12.282+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Creating new db @ /var/www/ddl/scripts/./graph.db/neostore
2015-07-01 01:58:13.238+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Missing counts store, rebuilding it.
2015-07-01 01:58:13.607+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: No lucene scan store index found, this might just be first use. Preparing to rebuild.
2015-07-01 01:58:13.663+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: No lucene scan store index found, this might just be first use. Preparing to rebuild.
2015-07-01 01:58:13.952+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Rebuilding lucene scan store, this may take a while
2015-07-01 01:58:13.955+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Lucene scan store rebuilt (roughly -1 nodes)
2015-07-01 01:58:30.337+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: IMPORT DONE in 18s 182ms. Imported:
  95941 nodes
  158227 relationships
  369482 properties
2015-07-01 01:58:30.341+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: About to rotate counts store at transaction 1 to [/var/www/ddl/scripts/./graph.db/neostore.counts.db.b], from [/var/www/ddl/scripts/./graph.db/neostore.counts.db.a].
2015-07-01 01:58:30.344+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Successfully rotated counts store at transaction 1 to [/var/www/ddl/scripts/./graph.db/neostore.counts.db.b], from [/var/www/ddl/scripts/./graph.db/neostore.counts.db.a].

Best Answer

It turns out that what I needed to do is make sure my permissions are right. I fixed it with 

chown -r Neo4j:adm graph.db

and everything seems to work fine now. I think Neo4j should produce some sort of warning if it can't access graph.db

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