erpnext_admin_guide

3.2.2 Installation of a Side by Side Development Environment

There are scenarios that will necessitate the need for a side-by-side installation. The biggest reason is simple efficiency. There is rarely a need for smaller companies to run three separate environments on three separate servers, when one will do. Larger organizations will want to separate the servers out. Mostly due to more rigorous IT Change Management.

These instructions will install each environment into it’s own bench. The frappe bench program has the option of hosting more than one site at a time (called multi-tenancy), however you cannot separate upgrades and the code base by site. This is handled at the same bench configuration. One of the biggest reasons to have a set of isolated environments is to allow an administrator to conduct upgrades of the code without impacting production. That is impossible if the non-production environment sites are in the same bench as production.

The nginx web server supports name based resolution, so multiple sites can run off of the same IP address similar to how Apache httpd works. The folks at frappe have written bench so that even though each site has its own config/nginx.conf file, these are still symlinked in the /etc/nginx/conf.d/ directory, so nginx thinks they are all one configuration.

During installation we remove the sudo rights from the erpnext user. During run-time the erpnext user does not need sudo rights and it is a security risk to leave this configuration in place. We will need sudo rights for this procedure, so follow these steps to add the erpnext user to the proper sudoers group.

sudo usermod -aG [sudo group] erpnext

NOTE: For these steps we are going to assume you are installing a Stage environment called eprnext-stg. This will be the bench name and part of the site name. Remember that the site name needs to be a fully qualified domain name (such as erpnext-stg.domain.com) to work for name based resolution. This is why we set production with a fully qualified domain name.

NOTE: Recall that during installation on RHEL/CentOS that the base bench is placed in /home/root. Make sure you are there before you run these commands. Otherwise for Debian based distributions you should be in /home/erpnext.

Now become the erpnext user to setup a new bench.

sudo su - erpnext

# You should be in the root directory of the erpnext user
# Ensure that bench is setup to get the code from the master branch
bench switch-to-master
bench init erpnext-stg --verbose 2>&1 | tee erpnext-stg-install.log

# Now get the erpnext code from master branch
cd erpnext-stg
bench get-app erpnext https://github.com/frappe/erpnext --branch master \
    2>&1 | tee --append ../erpnext-stg-install.log

# Create the new site and install erpnext in one command
# You will be prompted for the mysql root password and to set the Administrator password
bench new-site erpnext-stg.[domain] --force --install-app erpnext \
    --verbose 2>&1 | tee --append ../erpnext-stg-install.log
bench enable-scheduler
sudo bench setup production --yes erpnext
bench restart

At this point everything should be ready. You can go to erpnext-stg.domain.com and you should get the logon dialog box to setup a fresh installation of ERPNext with the Setup Wizard.

Now remove sudoer rights from the erpnext user to move back to a run-time configuration.

# Logout as erpnext
exit

sudo usermod -G "" erpnext

Most administrators will now take a simple backup of the production site and then restore to the stage site. You will have a carbon copy of your production database in a stage environment that you can use for testing.