When developing Cypher statements for a Neo4j based application there are multiple ways to do this.
A lot of people (including myself) love the new Neo4j browser shipped with 2.0 and subsequent releases. This is a nicely built locally running web application running in your browser. At the top users can easily type their Cypher code and see results after executing, either in tabular form or as a visualization enabling to click through.
Another way is to use the command line and either go with neo4j-shell or use the REST interface by a command line client like cURL or more conveniently httpie (which I’ve previously blogged about).
Typically while building a Cypher statement you take a lot of cycles to hack a little bit, test if it runs, hack a little bit, test, …. This cycle can be improved by automating execution as soon as the file containing the cypher statement has hanged.
Linux comes with a kernel feature called inotify that reports file system changes to applications. On Ubuntu/Debian there is a package called inotify-hookable available offering a convenient way to set up tracking for a specific file or directory and take a action triggered by a change in the file/directory.
Assume you want to quickly develop a complex cypher statement in $HOME/myquery.cql. Set up monitoring using:
inotify-hookable -c ~/myquery.cql -c "(~/neo4j-enterprise-2.0.1/bin/neo4j-shell < ~/myquery.cql)"
Using your text editor of choice open $HOME/myquery.cql and change your code. After saving the statement will be automatically executed and you get instantly feedback.