What are Benches and Bench Groups?

Bench is a collection of apps and sites.
Bench Group is a collection of Benches .

Bench

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.

Cloud creates Benches from information stored on a Bench Group .

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

Bench Group

A Bench Group is not only a collection of Benches but it also consists of the template from which these Benches are created.

And so, it holds information such as:

Which apps to install.
What common site config flags to be set.
The version of dependencies to be used.

Private Bench Groups

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

When is a Bench created?

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

Doing so creates a Deploy which builds a Bench:
After the Deploy succeeds, a New Bench job, which initializes and runs the Bench , is created:

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

Term	Context	Description
Frappe Bench	Frappe Framework	Directory that holds a collection of Frappe Framework apps and sites on which they may be installed.
`frappe/bench`	Frappe Framework	CLI tool used to manage a Frappe Bench .
Bench	Cloud	Frappe Bench running inside a container from which your site is served.

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

How are all the benches related to each other?

I'm stupefied that you asked, but here you go:

A Bench image is built by running frappe/bench commands inside a Docker build to instantiate a Frappe Bench folder into which your apps are installed by—once again—running frappe/bench commands.

Once this Docker build completes, we run the Bench image as a container and then do one of the following:

Create a new site for you.
Move your existing site from another Bench to the current one.