This chapter will guide you to install Odoo from source in your development computer. Ideally, we need an Ubuntu 18.04 operating system. A Windows 10 system is also an option, since we will explain how to set up Ubuntu in the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Some reference code for this chapter can be found in the book's GitHub repository, https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Odoo-12-Development-Essentials-Fourth-Edition, in the ch02/ directory.

A Debian/Ubuntu system is recommended to run Odoo servers. While Odoo is multi-platform and can run on a variety of operating systems, it's also true that the Odoo R&D team considers Debian the reference deployment platform. In fact, Odoo's own SaaS operations are known to be Debian-based. It is also the most popular choice in the community. This means that it will be easier to find help or advice if you use Debian or Ubuntu. Even if you're from a Windows background, it will be important that you have some knowledge about it.

You will still be able to work from your favorite desktop system, be it Windows, Mac, or other Linux flavors, such as CentOS.

In Chapter 1, Quick Start Using the Developer Mode, we discussed the different options available to quickly get Odoo running on our computer. We want to go a little deeper, and run Odoo directly from the source code.

Odoo is built using the Python programming language, and it uses the PostgreSQL database for data storage; these are the two main requirements of an Odoo host. To run Odoo from source, we will first need to install the Python libraries it depends on. The Odoo source code can then be downloaded from GitHub. While we can download a ZIP file or tarball, we will see that it's better if we get the sources using the Git version control application; it'll help us to have it installed on our Odoo host as well.

We've seen how to create and initialize new Odoo databases from the command line. There are more commands worth knowing about for managing databases.

Although the Odoo server automatically takes care of managing databases, we can manually create PostgreSQL databases from the command line, using the following:

$ createdb MyDB

More interestingly, Odoo can also create a new database by copying an existing one, using the --template option. For this to work, the copied database can't have open connections to it, so make sure your Odoo instance is stopped and there is no other connection open for it. The command to use looks like this:

$ createdb --template=MyDB MyDB2

In fact, every time we create a database, a template is used. If none is specified, a predefined one called template1 is used.

To list the existing databases in your system, use the...

The Odoo server supports quite a few other options. We can check all the available options with --help:

$ ~/odoo-dev/odoo/odoo-bin --help

We will review some of the most important options in the following sections. Let's start by looking at how the currently active options can be saved in a configuration file.

Most of the options can be saved in a configuration file. By default, Odoo will use the .odoorc file. In Linux systems, its default location is in the home directory ($HOME), and in the Windows distribution, it is in the same directory as the executable used to launch Odoo.

Making new modules available in an Odoo instance so they can be installed is something that newcomers to Odoo frequently find confusing. But it doesn't have to be, so let's get familiar with that.

There are many Odoo modules available on the internet. The Odoo app store at apps.odoo.com is a catalog of modules that can be downloaded and installed on your system. Another important resource is the Odoo Community Association (OCA) maintained modules, also available on GitHub at https://github.com/OCA/. The OCA is a non-profit organization created to coordinate community contributions, promoting software quality, development best practices, and open source values...

It is a common case among Odoo developers to maintain code for several Odoo versions. Some organizational effort is needed to keep these projects alongside each other and working on the same development machine. And, there is some context switching needed when changing from one version to another. For example, the Odoo start executable is now odoo-bin, but in older versions it was odoo.py, and you need to remember that. With the move to Python 3, this can be even more confusing; you need to choose whether to use python / pip or python3 / pip3, depending on the Odoo server version you are working on at that moment.

Python includes virtualenv, a tool to manage independent Python environments on the same machine. Each environment has its own Python executable and installed libraries. You just need to activate the environment...