Frappe for Django developers

This post is part 1 of Frappe for Django developers tutorials. It compares various Frappe commands with Django commands.

What is Frappe Web Framework

Frappe is a web framework similar to Django.

Frappe applications are managed by a tool called bench. This post assumes that bench is installed. You can install bench from here.

Bench is Frappe manager. It is analogous to django-admin and manage.py.

Frappe vs Django commands

You can start a frappe project using:

bench init frappe-bench

Similar behaviour in Django is achieved using:

django-admin startproject django-project

The next step after bench init is adding a site to the bench. It can be done by issuing the following command:

bench new-site my.first

You will be prompted for your mariadb password which would look like

MySQL root password:.

Enter your mariadb password so that database for this site can be created. In frappe a new database is created for every site created using bench new-site.

bench new-site would also create an administrative user in the database. Username for this user would be Administrator and bench would prompt you to set a password. It would look like

Set Administrator password:.

Django doesn’t have an analogous command as bench new-site because by default each Django installation works with a single site. You are expected to put database configuration in Django settings.py

Edit your /etc/hosts and add the following line:

127.0.0.1   my.first

Start bench using following command:

bench start

This is similar to Django’s runserver:

python manage.py runserver

You should be able to access your site at http://my.first:8002 after issuing bench start. Navigating to this url will take you through a setup wizard. Once you complete the setup wizard, you would be redirected to /desk.

It should show you 3 tabs namely ‘Tools’, ‘Email Inbox’ and ‘Explore’.

You can create a new app using:

bench new-app meeting

Corresponding Django command for creating an app in a Django project is:

python manage.py startapp myapp

You can install app meeting on site my.second using:

bench --site my.second install-app meeting
bench --site my.third install-app library_management

Since Django is a single site setup, so we don’t have to add the app to the site.

Our next post in this series would focus on creating the Django poll application using Frappe.

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