Bench Manager - A Web UI for Managing Multiple Frappe Benches Locally

Frappe Framework
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Hey everyone,

Saw the discussion in A new bench with admin UI (2026) and it got me thinking, managing multiple local benches through the terminal is fine once you know the commands, but it gets repetitive fast, especially when you’re juggling several client environments at the same time.

So I built Bench Manager — a lightweight web UI that sits outside your benches and lets you manage all of them from a single browser tab.

The Problem It Solves

If you’re doing active ERPNext/Frappe development locally, you’ve probably got multiple benches running (or needing to run) at the same time - one for client A, one for staging, maybe a fresh one you’re testing something on. Keeping track of which is running, which port it’s on, and jumping into the terminal every time you want to start/stop/back up gets tedious.

Bench Manager gives you a simple dashboard to handle all of that without touching the terminal.

Screenshots

Dashboard - All Benches at a Glance

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Every bench is shown as a card with its status (Running / Stopped), port, app count, and site count. One-click Start and Stop buttons. The running benches have their port number highlighted so you can tell at a glance what’s live.

Bench Detail - Sites, Apps, Logs, Terminal

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Clicking into a bench gives you four tabs:

  • Sites - list of all sites with their DB identifier

  • Apps - apps installed in the bench

  • Logs - live log tail (web, worker, scheduler, error)

  • Terminal - run bench commands directly from the browser

Site actions are inline: Use, Migrate, Install App, Backup, Restore, Drop.

One-Click Backup with Download

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Hit Backup on any site and it runs bench backup with live output streamed to the UI. When it’s done, the backup files (database .sql.gz and site config .json) are listed with direct Download links - no need to dig through the filesystem.

Site Restore

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Restore accepts a .sql.gz database backup plus optional public/private files archives. Useful for pulling a production backup into your local bench for testing.

Create New Bench

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Create a new bench directly from the UI - name it, pick your Frappe branch (defaults to version-16 latest stable), and it runs bench init with live output streamed back so you can watch the setup happen.

Feature Summary

  • Dashboard with live status for all local benches

  • Start / Stop with one click

  • Live log streaming - web, worker, scheduler, error logs

  • Site management - migrate, install apps, backup, restore, drop

  • Backup download - files served directly from the browser

  • Create / Delete benches with live bench init output

  • Auto-detects the bench executable (virtualenv, PATH, Homebrew, macOS pip installs)

  • No Node.js required to run - frontend is pre-built

Who Is This For?

This is primarily aimed at local development - consultants, freelancers, or teams who maintain multiple bench environments on a single machine. It’s not trying to replace Frappe Cloud or be a production server manager; it’s a dev-time convenience tool.

I will soon be making it public, just wanted to soft launch it over here to get the community’s feedback on it.

7 Likes
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Great work! :clap: This is a very practical tool for developers and consultants who manage multiple ERPNext/Frappe environments daily.

The biggest value is not replacing terminal commands, but reducing the repetitive context switching between benches and remembering ports, statuses, and routine operations. Having everything accessible from a single dashboard can save a lot of time, especially when working across multiple client projects.

Thanks for sharing this with the community. Looking forward to seeing how Bench Manager evolves and whether features like site monitoring, backups, logs, and updates get added in future releases. :rocket:

1 Like
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Thanks @Zaryabqureshi ! Features like site backups and restore are already available as of now. Will add site monitoring in the feature list. Appreciate the feedback!

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Awesome, looking forward to it! When can we get access to the link or repo to try it out?

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i will be releasing it before the end of this week. I was hoping to get a little more feedback from the community regarding suggestions and features.

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Great Effort!
I liked the simple UI and the features. Restore backup through the UI was a feature my company wanted for a while. Will keep an eye on you project once it is released

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Thanks @Omar-Abdullah ! Sure will update over here soon once it is released. Appreciate it!

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Bench Manager has been released! Please make sure to check it out and raise issues if any!

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Does it support frappe v15?

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this isnt really a frappe app, it is an external app that need to be installed on your system and the path to the folder under which all your benches exist need to be configured in the .env file. once you run ./run.sh command it will run honcho to identify all the benches in that configured folder and display on 0.0.0.0:8500. so in simple terms, it works irrelevent of the frappe version @Omar-Abdullah

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I totally understand that. I meant that will it be able to operate with frappe v15 for features? somethings like database restoring, public and private files, and other site management stuff. Some endpoints and functions as you know might change a bit between major versions

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So we basically shell it out to bench cli rather than calling python apis. so as long as CLI flags stay stable (which they do for core operations), version doesnt really matter.

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Thanks for the clarification

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No problem! Do test it out and raise an issue if you find any.

1 Like