In Chapter 1, Installing the Odoo Development Environment, we looked at how to set up an Odoo instance using only the standard core add-ons that are shipped with the editor. This chapter focuses on adding non-core add-ons to an Odoo instance. In Odoo, you can load add-on from multiple directories. In addition, it is recommended that you load your third-party add-ons (for example, OCA modules) or your own custom add-ons from separate folders to avoid conflicts with Odoo core modules. Even Odoo Enterprise Edition is a type of add-on directory, and you need to load this just like a normal add-ons directory.

With the help of the addons_path parameter, you can load your own add-on modules into Odoo. When Odoo initializes a new database, it will search for one of these directories that's been given in the addons_path configuration parameter. Odoo will search on these directories for the potential add-on module. Directories listed in addons_path are expected to contain subdirectories, each of which is an add-on module. After the initialization of the database, you will be able to install modules that are given in these directories.

This recipe assumes that you have an instance ready with a configuration file generated, as described in the Storing the instance configuration in a file...

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

Start your instance and connect to it using the Administrator account. After doing this, activate developer mode (if you don't know how to activate developer mode, refer to Chapter 1, Installing the Odoo Development Environment).

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 with similar life cycles or similar purposes 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 a Python virtualenv...

The core of the functionality of Odoo comes from its add-on modules. You have a wealth of add-ons available as part of Odoo itself, as well as add-on modules that you can download from the app store or write yourself.

In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to install and upgrade add-on modules through the web interface and from the command line.

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

Make sure that you...

GitHub is a great source of third-party add-ons. A lot of Odoo partners use GitHub to share the add-ons they maintain internally, and the Odoo Community Association (OCA) collectively maintains several hundred add-ons on GitHub. Before you start writing your own add-on, 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 add-on 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...

Most add-ons that are 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 have 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 12.0 branch of the partner-contact project. In this case, you will want to update your instance with this latest version.

In the GitHub world, a Pull Request (PR) is a request that's made by a developer so that the maintainers of a project can 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 into 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 hasn't been merged in the 12.0 branch of the project. The developer asks you to validate the fix in PR #123. You...