Frappe Insights

Open Source Business Intelligence Tool

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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.

Screenshots

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: Frappe Insights a user-friendly query builder interface that allows users to create queries without any SQL knowledge. The interface provides a step-by-step approach for building queries, empowering 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 written in Python and Javascript. The framework provides a robust foundation for building web applications, including a database abstraction layer, user authentication, and a REST API.

• Frappe UI: A Vue-based UI library, to provide a modern user interface. The Frappe UI library provides a variety of components that can be used to build single-page applications on top of the Frappe Framework.

• Ibis: A Python library to interact with SQL databases using a high-level API. Ibis provides a unified interface to interact with 20+ databases, allowing Frappe Insights to support multiple database backends.

• eCharts: A powerful charting library, to render charts and graphs. eCharts provides a variety of chart types and customization options, allowing Frappe Insights to provide a rich and interactive data visualization experience.

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

The script will set up a production-ready instance of Frappe Insights with all the necessary configurations in about 5 minutes.

Development Setup

Docker

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

Step 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

Step 2: Run the container and daemonize it

docker compose up -d

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

• Username: Administrator
• Password: admin

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, run the following commands:

   # Create a new site
   bench new-site insights.test
   
   # Map your site to localhost
   bench --site insights.test add-to-hosts
   

3. Get the Insights app and install it

   # Get the Insights app
   bench get-app https://github.com/frappe/insights
   
   # Install the app
   bench --site insights.test install-app insights
   

4. Open the URL http://insights.test:8000/insights in your browser, you should see the app running

Frontend Development Setup

The Insights frontend is a Vue.js application located in the frontend/src2 directory. Follow these steps to set up the frontend development environment:

1. Navigate to the Insights app directory:

   cd apps/insights

2. Install dependencies:

   yarn install

3. Add the following line in your site's site_config.json file

   "ignore_csrf": 1

4. Start the development server:

   yarn dev

5. Access the development site:

   • Open http://insights.localhost:8080/insights in your browser
   • Any changes to files in frontend/src2 will automatically reload in the browser

Learn and connect

• Telegram Public Group
• Discuss Forum
• Documentation
• YouTube