What are Benches and Bench Groups?
Bench is a collection of apps and sites.
Bench Group is a collection of Benches.
Bench
A Bench is a collection of apps and sites. All sites on a Bench share the same configuration, such as the version of apps, or version of dependencies.
Frappe Cloud creates Benches from information stored on a Bench Group.
For a more technical explanation of what a Bench is, see the Bench confusion section.
Bench Group
A Bench Group is not only a collection of Benches but it also consists of the template from which these Benches are created.
And so, it holds information such as:
Which apps to install.
What common site config flags to be set.
The version of dependencies to be used.
Private Bench Groups
If you are using a private bench group then all of the above information can be set and updated by you.
When is a Bench created?
A Bench Group by itself does not run your site. For this you have to deploy a Bench. This takes place when you click on Deploy or Update Available on your Bench Group page.
Doing so creates a Deploy which builds a Bench:
After the Deploy succeeds, a New Bench job, which initializes and runs the Bench, is created:
Once the Bench is running, a new site is created on it, or an existing site is moved on to it from another Bench.
Bench confusion
If you are familiar with Frappe Framework development then term "bench" may not be a new one and might cause some confusion. This is a perfectly sane response to our shortcomings when it comes to naming things. To help clear this, I'll try and differentiate between the different benches:
Term | Context | Description |
|---|---|---|
Frappe Bench | Frappe Framework | Directory that holds a collection of Frappe Framework apps and sites on which they may be installed. |
| Frappe Framework | CLI tool used to manage a Frappe Bench. |
Bench | Frappe Cloud | Frappe Bench running inside a container from which your site is served. |
In the context of Frappe, all benches are conceptually linked (unless you are talking about a regular bench).
How are all the benches related to each other?
I'm stupefied that you asked, but here you go:
A Bench image is built by running frappe/bench commands inside a Docker build to instantiate a Frappe Bench folder into which your apps are installed by—once again—running frappe/bench commands.
Once this Docker build completes, we run the Bench image as a container and then do one of the following:
Create a new site for you.
Move your existing site from another Bench to the current one.