3.0 ERPNext Installation, Upgrades and Backups

3.1 Frappe Bench

Frappe bench is more than a program written in python. It is a workhorse that an administrator uses to manage a large amount of low level tasks for administrating ERPNext. Frappe bench is the first thing installed besides the base dependencies and is the first tool an administrator will go to when doing work with an ERPNext installation outside of the user interface.

ERPNext should be installed in a user directory on the Linux server and will run as that user. During installation this user should have sudoer rights, however after installation and in runtime in production environments this user should be unprivileged and should not have sudoer rights. The user must not be root either.

Best practice is to logon to the server with a regular user that has sudoer rights. Don’t logon as root. Use the sudo command to do any privileged work on the server. When working with bench, logon with the regular user and su to the erpnext user like this:

sudo su - erpnext
cd [bench name]/

NOTE: Using the dash ` - ` in the command, tells su that you want a login shell. This simulates the administrator logging into the server as that user and loads a full environment for you.

3.1.1 Frappe Bench Operating Environment

Once you have logged on to the server and become the erpnext user, you are ready to get to work with bench. During installation, bench will create the following directory structure:

• apps – The code is downloaded from GitHub to here
  • erpnext
  • frappe
  • [other installed apps]
• archive – Archived backups
• archived_sites – Archived Sites
• config – Various configuration files
  • pids – Process ID Files
• env – The bench operating environment
  • bin – python executables and scripts
  • include – Links to python includes
  • lib – Python libraries
  • local – Python local
  • selenium – Web browser automation tool
  • share – man pages
  • src – Other utilities like mysqlclient and pdfkit.
• logs – Various log files.
• node_modules – ERPNext uses a collection of NodeJS modules. The are installed here.
• sites – The top level directory for all sites on the installation. bench can manage multiple sites in one environment. If you are running in a multi-tenant environment you will see more than one [site name] directory.
  • [site name] – The name of the site. Usually is the same as the URI for the site.
    • error-snapshots
    • locks
    • private – Private file attachments to various documents inside the user interface are stored on the filesystem here.
      • backups – Backups for the site are stored here. See 3.4 Backups
    • public – Public file attachments to various documents inside the user interface are stored on the filesystem here.
    • task-logs

3.1.2 Frappe Bench Commands

Administrators need to be comfortable with the frappe bench command structure.

There is a cheat sheet available that is a good start.