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Installing Odoo and setting up a development environment

The Odoo Framework and App Suite

The Odoo software is split into 2 layers: the framework, and the modules/add-ons. The framework and around 80% of the modules are open-source and are available on https://github.com/odoo/odoo. Those sources are mandatory for running Odoo on a computer​

There are additional optional addons available to all odoo.com paying customers on the following private repository : https://github.com/odoo/enterprise. This collection of add-ons is recommended for using Odoo as an ERP and for developing add-ons.

❗  Make sure you are logged-in on GitHub to view the private repository. If you still can't view it, contact your Account Manager from Odoo to get access to the sources. For downloading the sources, you will also need to set up your ssh-key on GitHub

Finally, there is a third optional and open-source repository containing additional themes for the website : https://github.com/odoo/design-themes

Installing Odoo

There are 2 possible recommended location on your computer (or server) to install Odoo depending on your use case. 

With admin privileges (recommended for servers)

The recommended location for installing Odoo with admin privileges is /opt/odoo​. This will ensures the files are still mounted when no user is logged on the server

❗ We recommend to install Odoo via docker when installing it for a production environnement, to facilitate with deployment and testing. More information here : Installing and managing Odoo with Docker

You can execute these bash commands to download the sources to /opt/odoo​​ :

sudo mkdir /opt/odoo && sudo chown $USER /opt/odoo && cd /opt/odoo

# Downloads the 3 repositories (might take a while)
git clone git@github.com:odoo/odoo.git && \
git clone git@github.com:odoo/enterprise.git && \
git clone git@github.com:odoo/design-themes.git

Without admin privileges (recommended for developers)

Otherwise, if you wish to run Odoo manually during your session, you have two possibilities :

  • Recommended: Use the open-source tool Odev​ created and managed by the Services department at Odoo available here : https://github.com/odoo-odev/odev. This tool manages the install and update of Odoo sources (with worktrees), virtual environments, and provide miscellaneous tools useful to Odoo developers. You can read more about it on their readme

  • Download manually the sources to the recommended location : ~/.local/share/odoo​

To download the sources manually, you can execute these bash commands to manually download the sources to ~/.local/share/odoo​ :

mkdir ~/.local/share/odoo && cd ~/.local/share/odoo

# Downloads the 3 repositories (might take a while)
git clone git@github.com:odoo/odoo.git && \
git clone git@github.com:odoo/enterprise.git && \
git clone git@github.com:odoo/design-themes.git

Running Odoo for the first time

Odoo uses both command-line arguments and/or a configuration file located by default in ~/.odoorc​. However, it is recommended to create a odoo.conf​ file in your source installation folder (/opt/odoo/odoo.conf​ or ~/.local/share/odoo/odoo.conf​ depending on your installation location) so that it is always easily accessible and visible. This can be done with the following command :

# sudo touch /opt/odoo/odoo.conf  # Uncomment if installed with admin privileges in /opt/odoo
touch ~/.local/share/odoo/odoo.conf