Skip to main content
This guide starts a purely local Neo4j demo, loads the canonical reproducible fraud-ring fixture, and runs GraphCheck’s baseline-free demo checks. It requires no Aura, hosted database, or VM. For general installation and project usage, see the main README.

​
Prerequisites

  • Docker Engine or Docker Desktop with Docker Compose.
  • GraphCheck installed through the normal repository workflow. From a development checkout, use uv sync --group dev and prefix GraphCheck commands with uv run.
  • Local ports 7474 and 7687 available.
The demo uses Neo4j 5.26.28 with database graphcheck-demo. Its disposable local credentials are neo4j / Password@123, and Bolt is available only on bolt://localhost:7687.

​
Start and load the fixture

Run these commands from the repository root:
The wait command is required. Detached docker compose up -d starts the services asynchronously; it does not wait for the one-shot fixture loader. Only a successful fixture-seed completion means the demo graph is ready for GraphCheck. Download, checksum, connection, and Cypher errors produce a non-zero status instead of silently continuing. Compose anonymously downloads only fixtures/fraud-ring/seed.cypher from the public canonical graphora/graphcheck-fraud-ring-fixture repository at immutable commit d2b8c76c2d2940f53f71491703619961a699c293. It verifies SHA-256 d955dbf08a3821a53e3b39f4f5234c16d13eb08c33b2a573fe422c85d5dcd90a before seeding. GraphCheck does not maintain a copy of the fixture data. The seeded graph contains 5,011 nodes and 5,872 relationships.

​
Run GraphCheck

After fixture-seed completes successfully, run:
For a development installation, use uv run graphcheck run instead. The expected results are:
  • fraud-ring-conformance/account-no-orphans: 3 violations.
  • fraud-ring-conformance/account-owner-cardinality: 4 violations.
  • graphcheck-action-smoke/smoke-connection-alive: passes.
The two conformance failures are intentional planted defects. The overall GraphCheck exit code is therefore expected to be non-zero; this does not mean the Docker setup failed. Results and the offline HTML report are written under .graphcheck/runs/latest/. No baseline is created or required by the default quickstart. Drift and baseline testing is a separate follow-on workflow using examples/checks/example.yml with a genuine before-state baseline; that example is outside default check discovery.

​
Teardown

Remove the containers, network, downloaded fixture, and database volumes with:
The next startup creates and seeds a fresh graphcheck-demo database.

​
Troubleshooting

  • If startup reports that port 7687 or 7474 is already in use, stop the local service using that port before retrying.
  • If fixture loading fails, inspect docker compose logs fixture-fetch fixture-seed; do not run GraphCheck until docker compose wait fixture-seed succeeds.