Introducing Frappe-Manager for Effortless Frappe Installation

We are very excited to announce the first release of Frappe-Manager.

Frappe-Manager (FM for short) is a tool to create and manage local Frappe installations with just one command effortlessly. You can specify Frappe apps such as ERPNext, HRMS, and others via command line parameters.

FM is built with Python and uses Bench and Docker containers for spinning up the environment.

Backstory 

In our 14th year anniversary blog post, we highlighted Vision 500 – making rtCamp 500 strong over the course of the next 3 years. It is a big challenge but, the bigger challenge relies on operations of managing 500 people. These operations start from simple on-boarding tasks and complexity increases with each step, be it hiring, continuous feedback, managing skill-matrix and processing payroll.

To overcome the challenge, we decided to proceed with ERPNext, a fully Open-Source and well managed ERP from Frappe Technologies  to bring all the teams on a single platform to automate the processes and, more importantly, increase efficiency.

With a small team of 3, we launched our campus hiring site with Frappe HRMS this year. We built an app that automatically scored candidates based on their GitHub and Stack Overflow activity. Within the first few months, we got 60,000+ candidates registered on the site, and ERPNext handled it effortlessly. This led to an increase in our conversion rate from 1% to roughly 7%. 

With this success, we have decided to move our entire operations to ERPNext by the year 2025.

Frappe-Manager

We are building Frappe apps for each department, and testing them internally. We felt the requirement of a tool that could create a consistent development environment and easily spin up demo sites, without hampering any of the existing setup on the local machines.

Having the experience of building EasyEngine behind us, we decided to build an Open-Source tool of our own that spins up local Frappe installations with just one command.

Installation

You can install Frappe-Manager with:

pip install frappe-manager

Usage

Create a site named frappe.localhost with ERPNext v15:

fm create frappe.localhost --apps erpnext:version-15

Frappe-Manager uses containers to keep the installations isolated.

Frappe-Manager provides features like – Shell to run Bench commands, on-disk Bench installation to easily modify code with your favorite editor, MailHog for email capturing, and Adminer for database content management.

This is just a start, there are more features to be added. You can make feature requests on the GitHub repo.

For more details, checkout our Wiki and FAQ section.

Links: Frappe-Manager | Wiki | FAQ | EasyEngine