Use buildout for repeatable builds

So far, we have been manually setting up our instances. This cries for automation, and maybe you have already written a shell script to download the proper version of the addons your instance needs and streamlined the process. It turns out that there is a tool meant to help with doing this called buildout. Buildout is a Python-based build system for creating, assembling, and deploying applications from multiple parts, some of which may be non-Python-based. It lets you create a buildout configuration and reproduce the same software later.

This recipe shows how you can start using buildout to ensure you have the same setup in the development and production servers.

Getting ready

We assume that your instance only has a dependency on the server-tools project of the Odoo Community Association, and that your user-specific addon modules are living in the local/addons subdirectory of the project.

We also expect you to have installed the build dependencies of Odoo...