In-Place Updates
In-Place Updates is an experimental feature that allows you to update an existing bench without creating a new deployment. Since it skips the image build and bench provisioning process, updates can be completed much faster than a standard deployment.
This feature is intended for small, low-risk changes. Contact the Frappe Cloud team to enable In-Place Updates for your account before using it.
When to Use In-Place Updates
In-Place Updates are best suited for:
- Deploying small code changes quickly.
- Updating a limited number of production sites.
- Avoiding the time required to build a new bench image.
How It Works
A regular deployment performs the following steps:
- Builds a new Docker image with updated apps.
- Creates a new bench from that image.
- Moves your sites from the old bench to the new one.
An In-Place Update skips these steps and updates the existing bench directly, making deployments significantly faster.
Requirements
Before an In-Place Update can be performed, the following conditions must be met:
- All sites on the selected bench must be updated together.
- Only sites within a single site group can be updated.
- No apps can be removed from the bench.
- The selected bench must either have no previous In-Place Update history or have completed previous In-Place Updates successfully.
If any of these requirements are not satisfied, Frappe Cloud automatically performs a regular bench deployment instead.
How to Perform an In-Place Update
- Open your private bench and start the site update process.
- If your bench is eligible, the update dialog will display the Use In-Place Update option.
- Enable the checkbox.
- Click Update Site In Place.
- Monitor the progress from the generated update job.
Limitations
- Updates are less safe than regular deployments because changes are applied directly to the running bench.
- If an update fails, your site may experience downtime.
- Failing database patches are skipped by default to avoid interrupting the migration.
- No automatic backup is created before the update starts.
Always verify that your changes are backward compatible before running an In-Place Update. For major releases, schema changes, or high-risk deployments, a regular bench deployment is the recommended approach.
Automatic Recovery
If an In-Place Update fails, Frappe Cloud automatically attempts to recover the bench by creating a Recover Update In Place job.
If recovery is unsuccessful, the bench becomes ineligible for future In-Place Updates until it is updated using the standard deployment process.
