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.

Ready-to-install Odoo packages can be found at https://nightly.odoo.com, available as Windows (.exe), Debian (.deb), CentOS (.rpm), and source code tarballs (.tar.gz).

As developers, we will prefer installing them directly from the GitHub repository. This will end up giving us more control over versions and updates.

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 the 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.

To keep things tidy,...

To create and initialize an Odoo database with the Odoo data schema, we should run the Odoo server using the -d option:

$ ~/odoo-dev/odoo/odoo-bin -d testdb

This will take a couple of minutes to initialize the testdb database, and it will end with an INFO log message, Modules loaded. Note that it might not be the last log message, and it can be in the last three or four lines. With this, the server will be ready to listen to client requests.

By default, this will initialize the database with demonstration data, which is often useful for development databases. This is the equivalent to having the Load demonstration data checkbox ticked when creating a new...

At the time of writing, Odoo's latest stable version is version 11, marked on GitHub as branch 11.0. This is the version we will work with throughout the book.

The same is true for addon modules: as a general rule, an addon module developed for an Odoo major version will not work with other versions. When downloading a community module from the web, make sure it targets the Odoo version you are using.

On the other hand, major releases (10.0, 11.0) are expected to receive frequent updates, but these should be mostly...

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

$ ./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.

You may be running Odoo with a Debian/Ubuntu system either in a local virtual machine or in a server over the network, but you may prefer to do the development work at your personal workstation, using your favorite text editor or IDE. This may frequently be the case for developers working from Windows workstations, but it also may be the case for Linux users who need to work on an Odoo server over the local network.

A solution for this is to enable file sharing in the Odoo host so that files are made easy to edit from our workstation. For Odoo server operations, such as a server restart, we can use an SSH shell (such as PuTTY on Windows) alongside our favorite editor.

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 apps store at apps.odoo.com is a catalog of modules that can be downloaded and installed on your system. Another important resource are 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 quality, software best practices, and open source values.

To add...