Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Connecting to your Amazon Neptune graph

Once you have created a Neptune DB cluster, the next step is to set up the ways you want to connect to it.

Setting up curl or awscurl to communicate with your Neptune endpoint

Having a command-line tool for submitting queries to your Neptune DB cluster is very handy, as illustrated in many of the examples in this documentation. The curl command line tool is an excellent option for communicating with Neptune endpoints when IAM authentication is not enabled. Versions starting with 7.75.0 support the --aws-sigv4 option for signing requests when IAM authentication is enabled.

For endpoints where IAM authentication is enabled, you can also use awscurl, which uses almost exactly the same syntax as curl but supports signing requests as required for IAM authentication. Because of the added security that IAM authentication provides, it is generally a good idea to enable it.

For information about how to use curl (or awscurl), see the curl man page, and the book Everything curl.

To connect using HTTPS (which Neptune requires), curl needs access to appropriate certificates. As long as curl can locate the appropriate certificates, it handles HTTPS connections just like HTTP connections, without extra parameters. The same is true for awscurl. Examples in this documentation are based on that scenario.

To learn how to obtain such certificates and how to format them properly into a certificate authority (CA) certificate store that curl can use, see SSL Certificate Verification in the curl documentation.

You can then specify the location of this CA certificate store using the CURL_CA_BUNDLE environment variable. On Windows, curl automatically looks for it in a file named curl-ca-bundle.crt. It looks first in the same directory as curl.exe and then elsewhere on the path. For more information, see SSL Certificate Verification.

Different ways to connect to a Neptune DB cluster

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

There are several different ways to set up access to your Neptune DB cluster in its VPC: