ffm — Foxmayn Frappe Manager

Setting up a local Frappe/ERPNext development environment is notoriously painful. Developers must manually edit docker-compose YAML files, configure MariaDB and Redis connections, manage port allocations to avoid conflicts between benches, and set up reverse proxies for local domain routing. The official frappe_docker devcontainer approach works but requires significant Docker knowledge and manual configuration for each new bench.

Wrap the entire Frappe bench lifecycle — creation, startup, shell access, app installation, and teardown — into a single CLI tool that handles Docker orchestration, port management, and domain routing automatically.

• Built a Go CLI with commands for the full bench lifecycle: create, start, stop, shell, logs, delete — each generating and managing Docker Compose configurations automatically.

• Implemented smart port auto-allocation that scans for available ports across all benches, eliminating manual port conflict resolution.

• Added a shared Traefik reverse proxy that routes <bench>.localhost domains to the correct bench containers, so developers access each bench via clean URLs.

• Built Docker image layer caching: the first bench build downloads and configures the Frappe image, but subsequent benches with the same Frappe branch reuse cached layers — reducing creation time from minutes to seconds.

• Pre-configured the bench shell environment with zsh, zinit, starship prompt, syntax highlighting, and Go toolchain — plus automatic foxmayn-frappe-cli (ffc) installation for API-level management.

• Added multi-app installation support for both public apps (ERPNext, HRMS) and private repos via SSH/HTTPS, plus reverse proxy config generation for Caddy and Nginx.

Frappe developers can now spin up isolated development environments in seconds, with automatic port management, domain routing, and a pre-configured shell — eliminating the Docker expertise barrier that previously made local Frappe development inaccessible to many teams.