What are Benches?

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 the benches from templates which can be viewed under the Benches menu.

For a more technical explanation of what a Bench is, see the Bench confusion section.

The template holds information such as:

• Which apps to install.
• What common site config flags to be set for benches deployed from the current template.
• The version of dependencies to be used for the benches.

Private Bench"

If you are using a private bench then all of the above information can be set and updated by you.

When is a Bench created?

A bench template by itself does not run your site. For this you have to deploy that template. This takes place when you click on Deploy or Update Available on your Bench page.

1. When you do this, a Deploy job (visible in the Deploys tab) is created. This job builds a Docker image from the template and uploads it to the Frappe Cloud Docker registry.
2. After the Deploy job succeeds, a New Bench job (visible in the Jobs tab) is created. This job downloads the template’s image and runs it on the server.

Once the Bench is up and running, a new site can be created on it, or an existing site can be moved 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:

In the context of Frappe, all benches are conceptually linked (unless you are talking about a regular bench)).