Bench is a command-line utility that helps you to install, update, and manage multiple sites for Frappe/ERPNext applications on [*nix systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like) for development and production.
We recommend using either the Docker Installation to setup a Production Environment. For Development, you may choose either of the two methods to setup an instance.
A Frappe/ERPNext instance can be setup and replicated easily using [Docker](https://docker.com). The officially supported Docker installation can be used to setup either of both Development and Production environments.
A quick setup guide for both the environments can be found below. For more details, check out the [Frappe/ERPNext Docker Repository](https://github.com/frappe/frappe_docker).
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](https://frappe.io/docs/user/en/installation).
You'll have to set up the system dependencies required for setting up a Frappe Environment. Checkout [docs/installation](https://github.com/frappe/bench/blob/develop/docs/installation.md) for more information on this. If you've already set up, install bench via pip:
- **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.
For more in-depth information on commands and their usage, follow [Commands and Usage](https://github.com/frappe/bench/blob/develop/docs/commands_and_usage.md). As for a consolidated list of bench commands, check out [Bench Usage](https://github.com/frappe/bench/blob/develop/docs/bench_usage.md).
If you wish to extend the capabilities of bench with your own custom Frappe Application, you may follow [Adding Custom Bench Commands](https://github.com/frappe/bench/blob/develop/docs/bench_custom_cmd.md).
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`
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.
```sh
# 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.
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](.github/workflows/release.yml). Under this new pipeline, we do the following steps to make a release:
1. Merge `develop` into the `staging` branch
1. 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.
