Frappe

Frappe is the open source company behind ERPNext, an enterprise resource planning suite that competes with the SAPs and Oracles of the world on functionality but ships under a free software license. The framework underneath ERPNext is also called Frappe (FRamework + APPs), and the company has built a wide portfolio on top of it: HR, CRM, helpdesk, learning management, lending, insights, and the Frappe Cloud hosting platform.

Around 30 engineers work across this portfolio. Six of them work on ERPNext core, four work on the Frappe framework, and the rest are split across the smaller products and individual contributors. The community contributor pool is significantly larger, in the hundreds, and that's the population that opens most of the PRs the team has to merge.

The constraint Frappe has to solve is the one any enterprise software vendor hits: customers don't upgrade on the team's schedule. There are always at least two long-lived stable branches running in parallel, with the development version on top. Every fix has to backport across every active version, and forgetting one is the kind of thing that produces a support ticket months later.

Frappe had built its own backport tool before adopting Mergify. It worked, but Ankush is direct about the limits: it wasn't as feature-rich, and it missed cases. The migration to Mergify was driven by three specific things the team wanted automated end-to-end:

• Backports across every active version. A PR gets a label for the versions it should ship to, and Mergify opens the matching PRs against each version-{N}-hotfix branch once the original merges to develop. The full CI suite runs against each backport. Maintainers review what landed, not what to copy.

• Auto-merge on green CI plus approval. Once a PR has the right approvals and CI is green, Mergify merges. Frappe's CI is unusually heavy by open source standards: full UI tests on top of the backend test suite, because ERPNext is a large web application and regressions are hard to spot from unit tests alone.

• Auto-closing PRs on the wrong branch. New contributors regularly open PRs directly against a stable branch instead of against develop. Mergify closes those automatically with a comment pointing at the contributor docs. That used to happen several times a week and absorb maintainer attention every time.

Across the past 12 months, Mergify has handled more than 6,500 PRs across the Frappe organization. About a third of that volume sits on the Frappe framework repo and ERPNext, with the rest spread across HRMS, CRM, helpdesk, lending, the LMS, the insights product, and the Frappe Cloud control plane.

The change Ankush points to is the one that quietly shifts how a small team operates. Backports used to be the bottleneck that decided whether a fix actually reached enterprise customers running the previous LTS. Now they're a label. For a 30-engineer company that supports software running real businesses, that's the difference between every fix shipping everywhere and a long tail of "oh, that one only landed on develop."