In Chapter 1, Installing the Odoo Development Environment, we saw how to set up an Odoo instance using only the standard core addons, which are shipped by the editor. This chapter focuses on adding noncore addons to an Odoo instance, be it your own addons, or third-party addons, such as the ones maintained by the Odoo Community Association (OCA).

The addons path is a configuration parameter that lists the directories, which will be searched for addon modules by Odoo when it initializes a new database.

Directories listed in the addons path are expected to contain subdirectories, each of which is an addon module.

This recipe assumes that you have an instance ready, with a configuration file generated as described in Chapter 1, Installing the Odoo Development Environment. The source code of Odoo is available in ~/odoo-dev/odoo, and the configuration file is in
~/odoo-dev/my-instance.cfg.

As we said in the preceding recipe, when you add a directory to the addons path, just restarting the Odoo server is not enough to be able to install one of the new addon modules. A specific action is required for Odoo to scan the addons path and update the list of the available addon modules.

Start your instance and connect to the instance using the Administrator account and activate the developer mode (refer to Chapter 1, Installing the Odoo Development Environment).

To update the list of the available...

We recommend that your development and production environments all use a similar directory layout. This standardization will prove helpful when you have to perform maintenance operations, and it will also ease your day-to-day work.

This recipe creates a directory structure that groups files having similar life cycles or similar purpose together in standardized subdirectories. Feel free to alter this structure to suit your needs, but ensure that you have this documented somewhere.

To create the proposed instance layout, you need to perform the following steps:

1. Create one directory per instance:

$ mkdir ~/odoo-dev/projectname
$ cd ~/odoo-dev/projectname

2. Create...

The core of the functionality of Odoo comes from the addon modules. You have a wealth of addons available as part of Odoo itself as well as addon modules that you can download from the internet or write yourself.

In this recipe, we will show how to install and upgrade addon modules through the web interface and from the command line.

The main benefits of using the command line for these operations are being able to act on more than one addon at a time and having a clear view of the server logs as the installation or update progresses, which is very useful when in the development mode or when scripting the installation of an instance.

You have an Odoo instance with...

GitHub is a great source of third-party addons. A lot of Odoo partners use GitHub to share the addons they maintain internally, and the Odoo Community Association (OCA) collectively maintains several hundreds of addons on GitHub. Before starting to write your own addon, ensure that you check that nothing already exists that you can use as is or as a starting point.

This recipe will show you how to clone the partner-contact project of the OCA from GitHub and make the addon modules it contains available in your instance.

Suppose you want to change the way addresses are handled in your instance; your customer needs a third field in addition to Odoo's two fields (street and...

Most addons available on GitHub are subject to change and do not follow the rules that Odoo enforces for its stable release. They may receive bug fixes or enhancements, including issues or feature requests that you submitted, and these changes may introduce database schema changes or updates in the data files and views. This recipe explains how to install the updated versions.

Suppose you reported an issue with partner_address_street3 and received a notification that the issue was solved in the last revision of the 11.0 branch of the partner-contact project; you will want to update your instance with this latest version.

In the GitHub world, a Pull Request (PR) is a request made by a developer for the maintainers of a project to include some new developments. Such a PR may contain a bug fix or a new feature. These requests are reviewed and tested before being pulled in the main branch.

This recipe explains how to apply a PR to your Odoo project in order to test an improvement or a bug fix.

As in the previous recipe, suppose you reported an issue with partner_address_street3 and received a notification that the issue was solved in a pull request, which is not yet merged in the 11.0 branch of the project. The developer asks you to validate the fix in PR #123. You need to update a test...