Bench

Bench is a command-line utility that helps you to install, update, and manage multiple sites for Frappe/ERPNext applications on *nix systems for development and production.

Table of Contents

• Installation
  • Containerized Installation
  • Easy Install Script
  • Manual Installation
• Usage
• Custom Bench commands
• Bench Manager
• Guides
• Resources
• Development
• Releases
• License

Installation

A typical bench setup provides two types of environments — Development and Production.

The setup for each of these installations can be achieved in multiple ways:

• Containerized Installation
• Easy Install Script
• Manual Installation

We recommend using either the Docker Installation or the Easy Install Script to setup a Production Environment. For Development, you may choose either of the three methods to setup an instance.

Otherwise, if you are looking to evaluate ERPNext, you can register for a free trial on erpnext.com.

Containerized Installation

A Frappe/ERPNext instance can be setup and replicated easily using Docker. The officially supported Docker installation can be used to setup either of both Development and Production environments.

To setup either of the environments, you will need to clone the official docker repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/frappe/frappe_docker.git
$ cd frappe_docker

A quick setup guide for both the environments can be found below. For more details, check out the Frappe/ERPNext Docker Repository.

Easy Install Script

The Easy Install script should get you going with a Frappe/ERPNext setup with minimal manual intervention and effort. Since there are a lot of configurations being automatically setup, we recommend executing this script on a fresh server.

Note: This script works only on GNU/Linux based server distributions, and has been designed and tested to work on Ubuntu 16.04+, CentOS 7+, and Debian-based systems.

This script installs Version 12 by default. It is untested with Version 13 and above. Containerized or manual installs are recommended for newer setups.

Prerequisites

You need to install the following packages for the script to run:

• Ubuntu and Debian-based Distributions:

  $ apt install python3-minimal build-essential python3-setuptools

• CentOS and other RPM Distributions:

  $ dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"
  $ dnf install python3

Setup

Download the Easy Install script and execute it:

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frappe/bench/develop/install.py
$ python3 install.py --production

The script should then prompt you for the MySQL root password and an Administrator password for the Frappe/ERPNext instance, which will then be saved under $HOME/passwords.txt of the user used to setup the instance. This script will then install the required stack, setup bench and a default ERPNext instance.

When the setup is complete, you will be able to access the system at http://<your-server-ip>, wherein you can use the administrator password to login.

Troubleshooting

In case the setup fails, the log file is saved under /tmp/logs/install_bench.log. You may then:

• Create an Issue in this repository with the log file attached.
• Search for an existing issue or post the log file on the Frappe/ERPNext Discuss Forum with the tag installation_problem under "Install/Update" category.

For more information and advanced setup instructions, check out the Easy Install Documentation.

Manual Installation

Some might want to manually setup a bench instance locally for development. To quickly get started on installing bench the hard way, you can follow the guide on Installing Bench and the Frappe Framework.

You'll have to set up the system dependencies required for setting up a Frappe Environment. Checkout docs/installation for more information on this. If you've already set up, install bench via pip:

$ pip install frappe-bench

For more extensive distribution-dependent documentation, check out the following guides:

• Hitchhiker's Guide to Installing Frappe on Linux
• Hitchhiker's Guide to Installing Frappe on MacOS

Basic Usage

Note: Apart from bench init, all other bench commands are expected to be run in the respective bench directory.

• Create a new bench:

  $ bench init [bench-name]

• Add a site under current bench:

  $ bench new-site [site-name]

  • Optional: If the database for the site does not reside on localhost or listens on a custom port, you can use the flags --db-host to set a custom host and/or --db-port to set a custom port.

     $ bench new-site [site-name] --db-host [custom-db-host-ip] --db-port [custom-db-port]

• Download and add applications to bench:

  $ bench get-app [app-name] [app-link]

• Install apps on a particular site

  $ bench --site [site-name] install-app [app-name]

• Start bench (only for development)

  $ bench start

• Show bench help:

  $ bench --help

For more in-depth information on commands and their usage, follow Commands and Usage. As for a consolidated list of bench commands, check out Bench Usage.

Custom Bench Commands

If you wish to extend the capabilities of bench with your own custom Frappe Application, you may follow Adding Custom Bench Commands.

Bench Manager

Bench Manager is a GUI frontend for Bench with the same functionalties. You can install it by executing the following command:

$ bench setup manager

• Note: This will create a new site to setup Bench Manager, if you want to set it up on an existing site, run the following commands:

  $ bench get-app https://github.com/frappe/bench_manager.git
  $ bench --site <sitename> install-app bench_manager

Guides

• Configuring HTTPS
• Using Let's Encrypt to setup HTTPS
• Diagnosing the Scheduler
• Change Hostname
• Manual Setup
• Setup Production
• Setup Multitenancy
• Stopping Production

For an exhaustive list of guides, check out Bench Guides.

Resources

• Bench Commands Cheat Sheet
• Background Services
• Bench Procfile

For an exhaustive list of resources, check out Bench Resources.

Development

To contribute and develop on the bench CLI tool, clone this repo and create an editable install. In editable mode, you may get the following warning everytime you run a bench command:

WARN: bench is installed in editable mode!

This is not the recommended mode of installation for production. Instead, install the package from PyPI with: `pip install frappe-bench`

$ git clone https://github.com/frappe/bench ~/bench-repo
$ pip3 install -e ~/bench-repo
$ bench src
/Users/frappe/bench-repo

To clear up the editable install and switch to a stable version of bench, uninstall via pip and delete the corresponding egg file from the python path.

# Delete bench installed in editable install
$ rm -r $(find ~ -name '*.egg-info')
$ pip3 uninstall frappe-bench

# Install latest released version of bench
$ pip3 install -U frappe-bench

To confirm the switch, check the output of bench src. It should change from something like $HOME/bench-repo to /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages and stop the editable install warnings from getting triggered at every command.

Releases

Bench's version information can be accessed via bench.VERSION in the package's init.py file. Eversince the v5.0 release, we've started publishing releases on GitHub, and PyPI.

GitHub: https://github.com/frappe/bench/releases

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/frappe-bench

From v5.3.0, we partially automated the release process using @semantic-release. Under this new pipeline, we do the following steps to make a release:

1. Merge develop into the staging branch
2. Merge staging into the latest stable branch, which is v5.x at this point.

This triggers a GitHub Action job that generates a bump commit, drafts and generates a GitHub release, builds a Python package and publishes it to PyPI.

The intermediate staging branch exists to mediate the bench.VERSION conflict that would arise while merging develop and stable. On develop, the version has to be manually updated (for major release changes). The version tag plays a role in deciding when checks have to be made for new Bench releases.

Note: We may want to kill the convention of separate branches for different version releases of Bench. We don't need to maintain this the way we do for Frappe & ERPNext. A single branch named stable would sustain.

License

This repository has been released under the GNU GPLv3 License.