Documentation of the Bolt protocol, versions 3 and 4

[johannessen]

There are several software projects (e. g. libneo4j-client) that implement the only documented version of the Bolt protocol, version 1.

Neo4j 4 drops support for Bolt version 1 with 9ff0780. As a consequence, Neo4j 4 no longer supports the only version of the Bolt protocol that is openly documented and well-supported by third-party software. As far as I can see, this breaking change has so far not been mentioned in any of the release notes for Neo4j 4.

Is it correct that there is currently no documentation of Bolt versions 3 and 4 apart from the code itself?

If so, I humbly request that Bolt versions 3 and 4 be documented, at least in the form of a list of changes since version 1. This would help third-party software to support Neo4j 4 without the need for reverse engineering.

[technige]

We have an item on our roadmap to pick up protocol documentation again at some point in the future, but I cannot give you any timescales on this right now.

[davisford]

We have an item on our roadmap to pick up protocol documentation again at some point in the future, but I cannot give you any timescales on this right now.

Shouldn't documentation of a change to an open protocol like this be a bit higher on the list? I'm willing to try to help fix the client, but any documentation you can provide on the new protocol changes would be very helpful

[stefanak-michal]

I really like Neo4j. Also i've own socket PHP code and suddenly isn't working with new V4, because of this issue. I will really appreciate to get access to updated bolt protocol documentation. How can I help?

[tomswinkels]

Any update?

[SebastianKG]

Hi, I'm just checking in on this too. The Haskell Neo4j package hasbolt has been great to work with, but the maintainer can't easily make the library compatible with Neo4j 4 without documentation of the new protocol. See more here: zmactep/hasbolt#21.
It would help greatly to know what the status of this work is.

[OscarSouth]

Also checking in with an interest in hasbolt (zmactep/hasbolt#21)

[tim-hanssen]

It's hard to fix a driver without docs. Any progress on this?

[technige]

Just for the record, the Bolt protocol has never actually been officially documented. The https://boltprotocol.org website was only ever a "fan site", built using internal draft documentation from the initial release (Neo4j 3.0). That information may or may not be accurate, and has never been controlled by Neo4j.

However, we can now give you access to official documentation for the messaging protocol and syntax layer. This is up-to-date with Neo4j 4.1, and is available at https://7687.org. We will try to keep this up to date with new Neo4j releases, but cannot guarantee any timings.

[johannessen]

Thanks a lot for 7687.org! With that, I believe this issue is now resolved.