Connecting to an Amazon Neptune cluster

After creating a Neptune cluster, you must set up network access so that your applications can reach the cluster endpoint. The following sections describe the network connectivity options. For more information about querying your data after you connect, see Accessing graph data.

Network connectivity options

An Amazon Neptune DB cluster can only be created in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Its endpoints are accessible only within that VPC unless you enable and set up Neptune public endpoints for the DB cluster.

You can set up network access to your Neptune DB cluster in its VPC in several ways:

Verify your connection

After you set up network access, you can verify that your connection works by calling the instance status endpoint. A successful response confirms that your client can reach the Neptune cluster.

AWS CLI

Run the following command:

aws neptunedata get-engine-status \
  --endpoint-url https://your-neptune-endpoint:port \
  --region us-east-1

For more information, see get-engine-status in the AWS CLI Command Reference.

SDK

import boto3
from botocore.config import Config

client = boto3.client(
    'neptunedata',
    endpoint_url='https://your-neptune-endpoint:port',
    config=Config(read_timeout=10, retries={'total_max_attempts': 1})
)

response = client.get_engine_status()

print(response)

awscurl

awscurl https://your-neptune-endpoint:port/status \
  --region us-east-1 \
  --service neptune-db

Note

This example assumes that your AWS credentials are configured in your environment. Replace us-east-1 with the Region of your Neptune cluster.

For more information about using awscurl with IAM authentication, see Using awscurl with temporary credentials to securely connect to a DB cluster with IAM authentication enabled.

curl

Run the following command:

curl -G https://your-neptune-endpoint:port/status

Note

This command works only when IAM authentication is not enabled on your cluster. If IAM authentication is enabled, use awscurl or the AWS CLI instead.

A healthy cluster returns a JSON response that includes "status": "healthy". For example:

{
    "status": "healthy",
    "startTime": "Thu Aug 24 21:07:13 UTC 2023",
    "dbEngineVersion": "1.3.1.0.R1",
    "role": "writer",
    "dfeQueryEngine": "viaQueryHint",
    "gremlin": { "version": "tinkerpop-3.7.2" },
    "sparql": { "version": "sparql-1.1" },
    "opencypher": { "version": "Neptune-9.0.20190305-1.0" },
    "labMode": { ... },
    "features": { ... },
    "settings": { ... }
}

If you cannot reach the endpoint, verify that your network configuration allows traffic on port 8182 (or your configured port) and that your security group rules permit inbound connections from your client. For more information, see Securing access to Neptune. For help setting up the AWS CLI, SDKs, or curl, see Using command-line tools.