Open Source Business Analytics Tool

Open Source Business Intelligence Tool

Frappe Insights

Insights is a 100% open-source BI tool designed to make data analysis and reporting more accessible to technical as well as non-technical users.

Motivation

Building custom apps or creating structured data has been very easy with Frappe Framework. However, extracting information from these apps was not a very good experience. Users needed to know how to write SQL queries to create reports to gain valuable information from the data. So I wanted to improve the experience of building these reports and dashboards for everyone in our team.

Key Features

• Connect Multiple Sources: You can integrate data from multiple databases, files and spreadsheets. Getting all your data into one place helps you analyse interconnected data.

• Query Builder: You can use the query builder to create queries without any SQL knowledge. The interface provides a step-by-step approach for building queries, allowing users to easily select tables, add joins, apply filters, perform calculations, and more.

• Visualizations and Dashboards: You can visualize the query results using a variety of charts and graphs. Frappe Insights also suggests the best chart for a given result set. You can create dashboards using a drag-and-drop interface and add filters on the dashboard to apply to the charts.

• Database Support: Frappe Insights currently supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, DuckDB, and BigQuery databases. More database integrations are planned for the future.

Under the Hood

• Frappe Framework: A full-stack web application framework.

• Frappe UI: A Vue-based UI library, to provide a modern user interface.

• Ibis: A powerful library to compose SQL queries with dataframe APIs.

• eCharts: An interactive charting and data visualization library.

Production Setup

Managed Hosting

You can try Frappe Cloud, a simple, user-friendly and sophisticated open-source platform to host Frappe applications with peace of mind.

It takes care of installation, setup, upgrades, monitoring, maintenance and support of your Frappe deployments. It is a fully featured developer platform with an ability to manage and control multiple Frappe deployments.

Self Hosting

Follow these steps to set up Frappe Insights in production:

Step 1: Download the easy install script

wget https://frappe.io/easy-install.py

Step 2: Run the deployment command

python3 ./easy-install.py deploy \
    --project=insights_prod_setup \
    --email=your_email.example.com \
    --image=ghcr.io/frappe/insights \
    --version=stable \
    --app=insights \
    --sitename subdomain.domain.tld

Replace the following parameters with your values:

• your_email.example.com: Your email address
• subdomain.domain.tld: Your domain name where Insights will be hosted

Step 3: Enable Server Scripts

docker compose -p insights_prod_setup exec backend bench set-config -g server_script_enabled 1

Step 4: Access the site

Open the site in your browser at https://subdomain.domain.tld/ and login with the administrator credentials. You will find the admin password logged in the console after the deployment command is finished. Or you can find it in the insights_prod_setup-passwords.txt file created after the deployment.

Development Setup

Docker

You need Docker, docker-compose and git setup on your machine. Refer Docker documentation. After that, follow below steps:

1. Setup folder and download the required files

   mkdir frappe-insights
   cd frappe-insights
   
   # Download the docker-compose file
   wget -O docker-compose.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frappe/insights/develop/docker/docker-compose.yml
   
   # Download the setup script
   wget -O init.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frappe/insights/develop/docker/init.sh
   

2. Run the container and daemonize it

   docker compose up -d
   

3. The site http://insights.localhost:8000/insights should now be available. The default credentials are:

   • Username: Administrator
   • Password: admin

4. If you need to stop the containers after use and persist the data

   docker compose stop
   

5. If you need to stop the containers cleanup entire setup after trying it out

   docker compose down
   

Local

To setup the repository locally follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Setup bench by following the Installation Steps and start the server

   bench start
   

2. In a separate terminal window, cd into frappe-bench directory and run the following commands:

   bench get-app insights
   bench new-site insights.test --install-app insights
   bench --site insights.test add-to-hosts
   bench --site insights.test browse --user Administrator
   

3. Now, open a new terminal session and cd into frappe-bench/apps/insights, and run the following commands:

   yarn
   yarn dev
   

4. Now, you can access the site on vite dev server at http://insights.test:8080

Compatibility Matrix

A nightly workflow installs each branch and runs the test suite, on the Node and Python each Frappe branch supports. Pull requests into version-3 run it too. It verifies these combinations:

Insights Branch	Frappe Framework	Node	Python
main	version-15	18	3.10
version-3	version-15, version-16	18, 24	3.10, 3.14
develop	develop	24	3.14

Learn and connect

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• Discuss Forum
• Documentation
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