Download

Details on how to install Bulbs and Neo4j Server or Rexster.

Bulbs is an open-source Python persistence framework for graph databases, and it is the first piece of a larger Web-development toolkit that will be released in the upcoming weeks.

1. Get Bulbs

Bulbs is a Python library, and the source code is on GitHub at https://github.com/espeed/bulbs.

You can use pip to install the latest version from GitHub into your project’s virtual environment:

$ mkdir example
$ cd example
$ virtualenv env
$ source env/bin/activate
(env)$ pip install https://github.com/espeed/bulbs/tarball/master

Or you can use pip to install a potentially slightly older version from PyPi:

$ mkdir example
$ cd example
$ virtualenv env
$ source env/bin/activate
(env)$ pip install bulbs

Feedback welcome.

See the Bulbs installation docs for more details.

2. Get Neo4j Server or Rexster

Bulbs presently supports both Neo4j Server <http://neo4j.org>`_and `Rexster <http://rexster.tinkerpop.com>, and you can add additional backends by implementing the Client interface.

Neo4j Server is Neo4j’s native REST server.

Rexster is a REST server tha supports any Blueprints-enabled graph database, including Neo4j, OrientDB, Dex, OpenRDF, and InfiniteGraph.

Get Neo4j Server

To get Neo4j Server, download the latest edition from http://neo4j.org/download/, then do:

$ tar -xvzf neo4j-<version>-unix.tar.gz
$ cd neo4j-<version>
$ bin/neo4j start

This will install Neo4j Server and start it using the default configuration.

See the Neo4j docs for more details.

Get Rexster

To get Rexster, make sure you have Git and Mavern installed, then do:

$ git clone https://github.com/tinkerpop/rexster.git
$ cd rexster
$ mvn clean install

This will install Rexster and automatically download embedded versions of the graph databases it supports.

See the Rexster docs for more details.

3. Get Gremlin

(Optional) Gremlin is a domain-specific language for graph databases (like SQL for graphs), and it’s what you use to write queries in Bulbs.

Rexster and Neo4j Server automatically install and use an embedded version of Gremlin, but it’s nice to have the Gremlin REPL installed to experiment with queries.

To install the Gremlin REPL, make sure you have Git and Maven installed, then do:

$ git clone https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin.git
$ cd gremlin
$ mvn clean install

See the Gremlin docs for more details.

What’s Next?

After you download and install Bulbs and either Neo4j Server or Rexster, read the Bulbs docs for information on how to build something with it.