Fr

ee

Odoo Development Cookbook

These practical and easy-to-follow recipes are presented step by step, with dozens of hands-on recipes
to boost your Odoo skills.

What this book will do

for you...
Install and manage Odoo environments

and instances
Use models to define your application's

data structures
Add business logic to your applications
Implement automated tests and debug

Odoo apps

Inside the Cookbook...

Quick answers to common problems

Develop frontend website features

Clear explanations of what you did

problems efficiently

Solutions that can be applied to solve

Holger Brunn
Daniel Reis

Carefully organized instructions to solve

real-world problems

Alexandre Fayolle

and features
$ 49.99 US
31.99 UK

community experience distilled

pl
e

A selection of the most important tasks

Use backend views to create a user interface

P U B L I S H I N G

Sa

A straightforward and easy-to-follow format

and problems

Extend the web client with new widgets

Odoo Development Cookbook

Odoo Development Cookbook starts by covering Odoo installation and administration, and provides
a gentle introduction to application development. It then dives deep into several of the areas that an
experienced developer will need to use. You'll learn how to implement business logic, adapt the UI, and
extend existing features.

Prices do not include

local sales tax or VAT
where applicable

P U B L I S H I N G

Visit www.PacktPub.com for books, eBooks,

code, downloads, and PacktLib.

Odoo Development
Cookbook
Build effective applications by applying Odoo development
best practices

Holger Brunn
Daniel Reis

Alexandre Fayolle

In this package, you will find:

The authors biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 'Installing the Odoo Development
Environment'
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Odoo Development Cookbook

About the Authors

Holger Brunn has been a fervent open source advocate since he came in to contact
with the open source market sometime in the nineties. With an academic background in
philosophy and sociology, he turned his interest to generalized logic, which proves helpful in
many aspects of his IT work. Turning into a professional programmer was a side effect of his
hobbyist interest, combined with a part-time job with a very open-minded mentor to whom he
owes a lot of gratitude.
He has programmed for ERP and similar systems in different positions since 2001. For the
last eight years, he has dedicated his time to TinyERP, which became OpenERP and evolved
into Odoo. Currently, he works at Therp BV in the Netherlands as a developer and is an active
member of the Odoo Community Association (OCA). He's most interested in fundamental work
on technical modules, but also enjoys contributing to other projects, with a focus on UI and
website widgets, CRM, and knowledge management.

Alexandre Fayolle started working with Linux and free software in the mid 1990s and
quickly became interested in the Python programming language. Between 1999 and 2012, he
helped manage Logilab, a company he cofounded, he specialized in Python development, and
had the opportunity to work on projects for large companies such as EDF, Arcelor-Mittal, and
GdF Suez (now Engie) using the Cubicweb framework.
He also tackled fun projects involving machine learning, natural language processing, and
multi-agent systems. In 2012, he joined Camptocamp to share his expertise on Python,
PostgreSQL, and Linux with the team implementing Odoo (OpenERP at the time). He
currently manages projects for Camptocamp and is strongly involved in the Odoo Community
Association. In his spare time, he likes to play the vibraphone in a jazz quartet, but has
recently been known for writing a book about Odoo, which he hopes you'll enjoy.

Daniel Reis has been working in the IT industry for over 15 years in developer, consultant,
and management roles. Most of this work was at the Capgemini multinational consultancy
firm, implementing proprietary business solutions for reference companies in a variety of
sectors, such as industry, telecommunications, and banking. Daniel has a BSc in applied
mathematics and a master's in business administration from the ISCTE Business School.
He's worked with Odoo solutions (formerly OpenERP) since 2010, and he is an active
contributor in the Odoo community association projects. He has been a speaker at the Open
Days annual conference and other open source events. He is the author of the first Odoo
development book: Odoo Development Essentials, also by Packt Publishing.
He currently works at Securitas, the global security services company, where he has
introduced Python, Odoo, and other open source solutions into the company's IT
applications portfolio.
I thank my wife, Maria Jos, for all the support and patience that made this
book possible.

Preface
Odoo, formerly known as OpenERP, is a great platform for developers. The framework at
its core is very rich and allows building clientserver applications from scratch as well as
adapting existing applications to your needs through a clever extension mechanism and a
very modular design. The latest versions have brought a wealth of new possibilities with the
addition of a full-featured website development stack. The scope is huge and it is easy for
newcomers to feel lost.
For years, Odoo developers have been learning their craft by reading the code of the addon
modules, which are built on top of the framework to provide enterprise management features.
While effective, the process is long and error prone, since it is difficult to know whether the
source code you are learning from is using the latest possibilities offered by the framework,
or if you are looking at an older module that has not been updated to use these features. To
make things worse, some code flows are intrinsically hard to follow because they're partly in
the business logic layer, partly in the database layer, partly in the request handling layer, and
partly in the client side code. The introduction of a new API in version 8 has made things even
more confusing, since most of the code base was not immediately ported to this new API.
This book is meant to save you time by tapping in to the years of experience accumulated
by long-time Odoo contributors to learn the current best practices in Odoo development by
focusing on the new features of version 9, and also giving a solid base in the existing mature
functionality of the framework. Since Odoo has a long tradition of guaranteeing backward
compatibility, most of the presented material should still work with the upcoming versions.

What this book covers

This book contains 16 chapters. We tried hard to make each chapter as independent as
possible, and to make the various recipes in each chapter self-contained.
Chapter 1, Installing the Odoo Development Environment, explains how to create a
development environment for Odoo, start Odoo, create a configuration file, and activate
the developer tools of Odoo.

Preface
Chapter 2, Managing Odoo Server Instances, is about addon installation and upgrading.
It provides useful tips for working with addons installed from GitHub, and organizing the
source code of your instance.
Chapter 3, Creating Odoo Modules, explains the structure of an Odoo addon module and
gives a step-by-step guide for creating a simple module from scratch.
Chapter 4, Application Models, focuses on Odoo model descriptions, and explains the various
field types and the different inheritance models available in Odoo.
Chapter 5, Basic Server Side Development, introduces the v8 API of Odoo, presents the
commonly used methods of the Model class, and explains how to write business logic methods.
Chapter 6, Advanced Server Side Development Techniques, deals with more advanced topics
useful when writing business methods such as writing wizards to walk the user through a
process or writing onchange methods. It also covers porting code from the old API to the
v8 API.
Chapter 7, Debugging and Automated Testing, proposes some strategies for server-side
debugging and an introduction to the Python debugger. It also explains how to write and
run automated tests using YAML or Python for your addon modules.
Chapter 8, Backend Views, explains how to write business views for your data models and how
to call server-side methods from these views. It covers the usual views (list view, form view,
and search view) as well as the views introduced in recent versions of Odoo (Kanban, graph,
calendar, pivot, and so on)
Chapter 9, Module Data, shows how to ship data along with the code of your module. It also
explains how to write a migration script when a data model provided by an addon is modified
in a new release.
Chapter 10, Access Security, explains how to control who has access to what in your Odoo
instance, by creating security groups, writing access control lists to define what operations are
available to each group on a given model, and, if necessary, by writing record level rules.
Chapter 11, Internationalization, deals with the translation of the user interfaces of your addons.
Chapter 12, Automation and Workflows, illustrates the different tools available in Odoo to
implement business process for your records. It also shows how server actions and automated
rules can be used to support business rules.
Chapter 13, Web Server Development, deals with the core of the web server in Odoo. It
explains how to map URLs to methods and how to control who can access these URLs.
Chapter 14, CMS Website Development, shows how to customize websites built with Odoo, by
writing your own templates and providing new snippets for use in the website builder.

Preface
Chapter 15, Web Client Development, dives into the JavaScript part of Odoo and explains
how you can provide new widgets and make RPC calls to the server. It also gives tips about
debugging and testing this part of your code.
Chapter 16, Server Deployment, provides advice on how to install and configure Odoo for
production, including setting up a reverse proxy to encrypt network communications over
HTTPS and ensuring that Odoo starts when the server boots.

Installing the
Odoo Development
Environment
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Easy installation of Odoo from source

Managing Odoo environments using the start command

Managing Odoo server databases

Storing the instance configuration in a file

Activating the Odoo developer tools

Updating Odoo from source

Introduction
There are lots of ways to set up an Odoo development environment. This chapter proposes
one of these, although you will certainly find a number of other tutorials on the web explaining
other approaches. Keep in mind that this chapter is about a development environment, which
has different requirements from a production environment, covered in Chapter 16, Server
Deployment.

Installing the Odoo Development Environment

Easy installation of Odoo from source

For Odoo deployment, it is recommended to use a GNU/Linux environment. You may be
more at ease using Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X, but the fact is that most of the Odoo
developers are using GNU/Linux and you are much more likely to get support from the
community for OS-level issues happening on GNU/Linux than on Windows.
It is also recommended to develop using the same environment (same distribution, same
version) as the one which will be used in production. This will avoid nasty surprises such as
discovering on the day of deployment that some library has a different version than expected,
with a slightly different and incompatible behavior. If your workstation is using a different OS,
a good approach is to set up a virtual machine on your workstation and to install a GNU/Linux
distribution in the VM.
To avoid copying files between your workstation where you are running
your development environment and the virtual machine which runs Odoo,
you can configure a SAMBA share inside the virtual machine and store the
source code there. You can then mount the share on your workstation in
order to edit the files easily.

This book assumes you are running Debian GNU/Linux as its stable version (Jessie at the time
of writing). Ubuntu is another popular choice, and since it is built on top of Debian, most of
the examples in this book should work unchanged. Whatever Linux distribution you choose,
you should have some notion of how to use it from the command line, and having a few ideas
about system administration will certainly not cause any harm.

Getting ready
We assume that Linux is up and running and that you have an account with root access, either
because you know the root password or because sudo has been configured. In the following
pages, we will be using $(whoami) whenever the login of your work user is required in a
command line. This is a shell command which will substitute your login in the command you
are typing.
Some operations will definitely be easier if you have a GitHub account. Go to
https://github.com and create one if you don't have one already.

How to do it...
To install Odoo from source, you need to follow these steps:
1. Run the following commands to install the main dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get install git python2.7 postgresql nano \
python-virtualenv
2

Chapter 1
2. Download and install wkhtmltopdf:
$ wget http://nightly.odoo.com/extra/wkhtmltox-0.12.1.2_linuxjessie-amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i wkhtmltox-0.12.1.2_linux-jessie-amd64.deb

Caution!
This is a package provided by the Odoo maintainer for Debian Jessie.
If you are using another distribution, browse to http://download.
gna.org/wkhtmltopdf/0.12/0.12.1/ and download the
package for your operating system.

3. Now, use this to install the build dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install gcc python2.7-dev libxml2-dev \
libxslt1-dev libevent-dev libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev libpq-dev \
libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev

4. Configure PostgreSQL:
$ sudo -u postgres createuser --createdb $(whoami)
$ createdb $(whoami)

5. Configure git:
$ git config --global user.name "Your Name"
$ git config --global user.email youremail@example.com

6. Clone the Odoo code base:

$ mkdir ~/odoo-dev
$ cd ~/odoo-dev
$ git clone -b 9.0 --single-branch https://github.com/odoo/odoo.
git
$ cd odoo

7.

Create an odoo-9.0 virtual environment and activate it:

$ virtualenv ~/odoo-9.0
$ source ~/odoo-9.0/bin/activate

8. Install the Python dependencies of Odoo in virtualenv:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Installing the Odoo Development Environment

9. Create and start your first Odoo instances:
$ createdb odoo-test
$ python odoo.py -d odoo-test --addons-path=addons \
--dbfilter=odoo-test$

10. Point your browser to http://localhost:8069 and authenticate using the admin
account and admin as password.
You can download the example code files for this book from your account at
http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you
can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have
the files e-mailed directly to you.
You can download the code files by following these steps:

Log in or register to our website using your e-mail address and

password

Hover the mouse pointer on the SUPPORT tab at the top

Click on Code Downloads & Errata

Enter the name of the book in the Search box

Select the book for which you're looking to download the code files

Choose from the drop-down menu where you purchased this book
from

Click on Code Download

You can also download the code files by clicking on the Code Files button
on the book's webpage at the Packt Publishing website. This page can be
accessed by entering the book's name in the Search box. Please note that
you need to be logged in to your Packt account.
Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the
folder using the latest version of:

WinRAR / 7-Zip for Windows

Zipeg / iZip / UnRarX for Mac

7-Zip / PeaZip for Linux

How it works...
Dependencies come from various sources. First, you have the core dependencies of Odoo,
the Python interpreter that is used to run the source code, and the PostgreSQL database
server used to store the instance data. Git is used for source code versioning and getting
the source code of Odoo itself.

Chapter 1
Since we will need to edit some files as root or as postgres (the PostgreSQL administrative
user) on our server, we need to install a console-based text editor. We suggest nano as it is
very simple to use, but feel free to choose any editor with which you feel at ease as long as it
works on the console, such as vim, e3, or emacs-nox.
Wkhtmltopdf is a runtime dependency of Odoo used to produce PDF reports. The version
required by Odoo 9.0 is 0.12.1, which is not included in current GNU/Linux distributions.
Fortunately for us, the maintainers of wkhtmltopdf provide prebuilt packages for various
distributions on http://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html (in the archive section).
However, Debian Jessie is not there, so the Odoo maintainers provide their own version of the
package on http://nightly.odoo.com/extra/.
There are lots of other runtime dependencies that are Python modules, which we can install
using pip in a virtual environment. However, some of these Python modules can feature
some dependencies on native C libraries for which the Python bindings need to be compiled.
We therefore install the development packages for these C libraries as well as the Python
development package and a C compiler. Once these build dependencies are installed, we
can use pip -r requirements.txt (a file which comes from the Odoo source code
distribution) to download, compile, and install the Python modules.

Virtual environments
Python virtual environments, or virtualenv for short, are isolated Python workspaces. They
are very useful to Python developers because they allow different workspaces with different
versions of various Python libraries installed, possibly on different Python interpreter versions.
You can create as many environments as you wish using the command virtualenv path/
to/newenv. This will create a newenv directory in the specified location, containing a
bin/ subdirectory and a lib/python2.7 subdirectory.
In bin/ you will find several scripts:

activate: The script is not executed, it is sourced using the built-in source shell.
This will activate the environment by adjusting the PATH environment variable to
include the bin/ directory of the virtualenv. It also installs a shell function called
deactivate, which you can run to exit the virtualenv, and changes the shell
prompt to let you know which virtualenv is currently activated

pip: This is a special version of the pip command which acts inside the
virtualenv only.

python: This is a wrapper around your system Python interpreter which uses the
packages installed in the virtualenv.

Installing the Odoo Development Environment

The built-in source shell is also available (as a single dot, followed
by a space, and the path to the file to source). The shortcut form is
perfectly fine, but we will stick to source in this book for readability.

There are two main ways of using a virtualenv. You may activate it as we show in the recipe
(and call deactivate when you're done) or you may use the scripts in the bin/ directory of
the environment explicitly by calling them with their full path, in which case you don't need to
activate the virtualenv. This is mainly a matter of taste, so you should experiment and find
out which style suits you better for which case.
You may have executable Python scripts with the first line looking like the following:
#! /usr/bin/env python

These will be easier to use with an activated virtualenv. This is the case with the odoo.py
script, which you can therefore call in the following way:
$ ./odoo.py -d odoo-test --addons-path=addons --db-filter=odoo-test$

PostgreSQL configuration
On a GNU/Linux system, Odoo works very well with the default values of psycopg2, the
Python module used to access a PostgreSQL database:

Passwordless authentication if the database user has the same name as the current
user on local connections

Local connection uses Unix domain sockets

The database server listens on port 5432

In that case, there is nothing special to do: we use the postgres administrative user to
create a database user which shares our login name and give it the right to create new
databases. We then create a new database with the same name as the new user, which
will be used as a default database when using the psql command.
When on a development server, it is OK to give the PostgreSQL user more rights and to use
the --superuser command-line option rather than just --createdb. The net effect is that
this user can then also create other users and globally manage the database instance. If
you feel --superuser is too much, you may still want to use --createrole in addition to
--createdb when creating your database user. Avoid doing this on production servers as
it would give additional leverage to an attacker exploiting a vulnerability in some part of the
deployed code (see Chapter 16, Server Deployment).
If you want to use a database user with a different login, you will need to provide a password
for the user. This is done by passing the --pwprompt flag on the command line when
creating the user, in which case the command will prompt you for the password.

Chapter 1
If the user has already been created and you want to set a password (or modify a forgotten
password) you can use the following command:
$ psql -c "alter role $(whoami) with password 'newpassword'"

If this command fails with an error message saying that the database
does not exist, it is because you did not create a database named after
your login name in step 3. That's fine; just add the --dbname option
with an existing database name such as --dbname template1.

Git configuration
At some point in the book, you will need to use git commit. This will fail unless some basic
configuration is performed; you need to provide Git with your name and email address. Git will
remind you to do this with a nice error message, but you may as well do it now.
This is also something to keep in mind if you are using a service such
as Travis for continuous integration, and your test scripts need to
perform some git merges: you have to provide a dummy name and
e-mail for the merging to succeed.

Downloading the Odoo source code

Downloading the Odoo code base is done by performing a git clone operation. Be
patient as this will take some time. The options --branch 9.0 --single-branch avoid
downloading other branches and save a little time. The --depth option can also be used to
avoid downloading the whole repository history, but the downside of that option is that you will
not be able to explore that history when looking for issues.
The Odoo developers also propose nightly builds, which are available as tarballs and
distribution packages. The main advantage of using a git clone is that you will be able to
update your repository when new bug fixes are committed in the source tree. You will also be
able to easily test any proposed fixes and track regressions, so you can make your bug reports
more precise and helpful for the developers.

Starting the instance

Now comes the moment you've been waiting for. To start our first instance, we first create
a new empty database and then use the odoo.py script with the following command-line
arguments:

-d database_name: Use that database by default.

Installing the Odoo Development Environment

--db-filter=database_name$: Only try to connect to databases matching the

supplied regular expression. One Odoo installation can serve multiple instances living
in separate databases and this argument limits the available databases. The trailing
$ is important as the regular expression is used in match mode; this avoids selecting
names starting with the specified string.

--addons-path=directory1,directory2,...: This is a comma separated list

of directories in which Odoo will look for addons. This list is scanned at the instance
creation time to populate the list of available add-on modules in the instance.
If you are using a database user with a database login different from your Linux login, you
need to pass the following additional arguments:

--db_host=localhost: use a TCP connection to the database server

--db_user=database_username: use the specified database login

--db_password=database_password: the password to use to authenticate

against the PostgreSQL server

To get an overview of all the available options, use the --help argument. We will see much
more about the odoo.py script in this chapter as well as in Chapter 2, Managing Odoo Server
Instances.
When Odoo is started on an empty database, it will first create the database structure
needed to support its operations. It will also scan the addons path to find the available addon
modules, and insert some the initial records in the database. This includes the admin user
with the default password admin which you will use to authenticate with.
Odoo includes an HTTP server. By default, it listens on all local network interfaces on TCP port
8069 so pointing your web browser to http://localhost:8069/ leads you to your newly
created instance.

There is more
In the recipe, we downloaded the latest stable version of Odoo using the following command:
$ git clone -b 9.0 --single-branch https://github.com/odoo/odoo.git

This uses the official branch maintained by Odoo. One issue with this branch is that bug
fixes contributed by the community are not always merged in a timely fashion. The Odoo
Community Association (OCA) maintains a parallel branch in which fixes and improvements
are peer-reviewed by the community and tend to be merged faster than on the official branch.
It is not a fork of Odoo, and the latest version of Odoo is merged back into that branch daily.
You may want to use it for your developments and deployments, in which case you need to
clone Odoo like this:
$ git clone -b 9.0 --single-branch https://github.com/OCA/OCB.git odoo

Chapter 1

Managing Odoo environments using the

start command
We will often want to use custom or community modules with our Odoo instance. Keeping
them in a separate directory makes it easier to install upgrades to Odoo or troubleshoot
issues from our custom modules. We just have to add that directory to the addons path and
they will be available in our instance, just like the core modules are.
It is possible to think about this module directory as an Odoo environment. The Odoo start
command makes it easy to organize Odoo instances as directories, each with its own modules.

Getting ready
For this recipe we need to have already installed Odoo. We assume that it will be at
~/odoo-dev/odoo, and that the virtualenv is activated.
This means that the following command should successfully start an Odoo server:
$ ~/odoo-dev/odoo/odoo.py

How to do it...
To create a work environment for your instance, you need to follow these steps:
1. Change to the directory where Odoo is:
$ cd ~/odoo-dev

2. Choose a name for the environment and create a directory for it:
$ mkdir my-odoo

3. Change to that directory and start an Odoo server instance for that environment:
$ cd my-odoo/
$ ../odoo/odoo.py start

How it works...
The Odoo start command is a shortcut to start a server instance using the current directory.
The directory name is automatically used as the database name (for the -d option), and the
current directory is automatically added to the addons path (the --addons-path option) as
long as it contains an Odoo addon module. In the preceding recipe you won't see the current
directory in the addons path because it doesn't contain any modules yet.

Installing the Odoo Development Environment

There's more
By default the current directory is used, but the --path option allows you to set a specific
path to use instead. For example, this would work from any directory:
$ ~/odoo-dev/odoo/odoo.py start --path=~/odoo-dev/my-odoo

The database to use can also be overridden using the usual -d option. In fact, all the other
usual odoo.py command-line arguments, except --addons-path, will work. For example,
to set the server listening port, use the following command:
$ ../odoo/odoo.py start --xmlrpc-port=8080

As we can see, the Odoo start command can be a convenient way to quickstart Odoo
instances with their own module directory.

Managing Odoo server databases

When working with Odoo, all the data of your instance is stored in a PostgreSQL database.
All the standard database management tools you are used to are available, but Odoo also
proposes a web interface for some common operations.

Getting ready
We assume that your work environment is set up and you have an instance running. Do not
start it using the odoo.py start command shown in the previous recipe, as it configures
the server with some options which interfere with multi-database management.

How to do it...
The Odoo database management interface provides tools to create, duplicate, remove, back
up, and restore a database. There is also a way to change the master password which is used
to protect access to the database management interface.

Access the Database Management interface

To access the database, the following steps need to be performed:
1. Go to the login screen of your instance (if you are authenticated, log out).
2. Click on the Manage Databases link. This will navigate to http://
localhost:8069/web/database/manager (you can also point your browser
directly to that URL.).

10

Chapter 1

Set or change the master password

If you've set up your instance with default values, and not yet modified it as explained in the
following section, the database management screen will display a warning telling you that the
master password is not set, and advising you to set one, with a direct link:

1. To set the Master Password, you can click on that link. You will get a dialog box
asking you to provide the new password:

2. Type in a non-trivial new password and click on Continue.

3. When the master password is already set, click the Set Master Password button at
the bottom of the screen to change it
4. In the displayed dialog box, type the previous master password and the new one, and
then click on Continue.
11

Installing the Odoo Development Environment

The master password is in the server configuration file under the admin_
password key. If the server was started without specifying a configuration
file, a new one will be generated in ~/.openerp_serverrc. See the next
recipe for more information about the configuration file.

Creating a new database

This dialog box can be used to create a new database instance which will be handled by the
current Odoo server:
1. In the database management screen, click on the Create Database button at the
bottom of the screen.

2. Fill the form in as follows:

Master password: The master password for this instance.

Database name: Input the name of the database you wish to create.

12

Language: Select the language you wish to be installed by default in the new
database.
Password of admin user: Type the password you want to set for the admin
user of the new instance.

Chapter 1

Load demonstration data: Check this box to have demonstration data. This
is useful to run tests or set up a demonstration for a customer, but should
not be checked for a database meant to contain production data.

3. Click on the Continue button, and wait a little until the new database is initialized.
You will then be redirected to the instance, connected as the Administrator.
Troubleshooting
If you are redirected to a login screen, this is probably because the option
--db-filter was passed to Odoo and the new database name did
not match the new database name. Note that the odoo.py start
command does this silently, making only the current database available.
To work around this, simply restart Odoo without the start command,
as shown in the first recipe of this chapter. If you have a configuration
file (see the Storing the instance configuration in a file recipe later in this
chapter), then check that the db_filter option is unset or set to a
value matching the new database name.

Duplicating a database
Very often you will have an existing database and you want to experiment with it to try a
procedure or run a test, but without modifying the existing data. The answer is simple:
duplicate the database and run the tests on the copy. Repeat as many times as required:
1. In the database management screen, click on the Duplicate link next to the name of
the database you wish to clone.

13

Installing the Odoo Development Environment

2. Fill in the form:

Master Password: the master password of the Odoo server

New Name: the name you want to give to the copy

3. Click on the Continue button.

4. You can then click on the name of the newly created database in the database
management screen to access the login screen for that database.

Removing a database
When you have finished your tests, you will want to clean up the duplicated databases. To do
this, perform the following steps:
1. In the database management screen, click on the Delete link next to the name of the
database you want to remove.

2. Fill in the form; enter the Master Password, which is the master password of the
Odoo server.
3. Click the Delete button.
Caution! Potential data loss!
If you selected the wrong database, and have no backup, there is no way
to recover the lost data.

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Chapter 1

Backing up a database
For creating a backup, the following steps need to be performed:
1. In the database management screen, click the Backup link next to the database you
want to back up.

2. Fill in the form:

Master Password: the master password of the Odoo server.

Backup Format: always use zip for a production database, as it is the only
real full backup format. Only use the pg_dump format for a development
database where you don't really care about the file store (admin by default).

3. Click the Backup button. The backup file will be downloaded to your browser.

15

Installing the Odoo Development Environment

Restoring a database backup

If you need to restore a backup, this is what you need to do:
1. In the database management screen, click the Restore Database button at the
bottom of the screen.

2. Fill in the form:

Master Password: the master password of the Odoo server.

File: a previously downloaded Odoo backup.

Database Name: provide the name of the database in which the backup will
be restored. The database must not exist on the server.
Generate a new database uuid: leave unchecked if you are installing a
database which has been deleted from the server; otherwise check the box.
There is little difference between them, and if in doubt, leaving it unchecked
is a safe choice.

3. Click the Continue button.

Note: It is not possible to restore a database on top of itself. If you try to
do this, you will get an error message (Database restore error: Database
already exists). You need to remove the database first.

16

Chapter 1

How it works...
These features, apart from the Change master password screen, run postgresql
administration commands on the server and report back through the web interface.
The master password is a very important piece of information which only lives in the Odoo
server configuration file and is never stored in the database. There used to be a default
value of admin, but using this value is a security liability as it is well known. In Odoo v9, this
is identified as an "unset" master password and you get urged to change it when accessing
the database administration interface. Even if it is stored in the configuration file under the
admin_passwd entry, this is not the same as the password of the admin user; these are two
independent passwords: the master password is set for an Odoo server process, which itself
can handle multiple database instances, each of which has an independent admin user with
his own password.
Security considerations: Remember that we are considering a
development environment in this chapter. The Odoo database
management interface is something which needs to be secured when you
are working on a production server as it gives access to a lot of sensitive
information, especially if the server hosts Odoo instances for several
different clients. This will be covered in Chapter 16, Server Deployment.

To create a new database, Odoo uses the PostgreSQL createdb utility and calls the internal
Odoo function to initialize the new database in the same way as when you start Odoo on an
empty database.
To duplicate a database, Odoo uses the --template option of createdb passing the
original database as an argument. This essentially duplicates the structure of the template
database in the new database using internal and optimized PostgreSQL routines, which is
much faster than creating a backup and restoring it (especially when using the web interface
which requires downloading the backup file and uploading it again).
Backup and restore operations use the pg_dump and pg_restore utilities respectively.
When using the .zip format, the backup will also include a copy of the file store which
contains a copy of the documents when you configure Odoo to not keep these in the
database, which is the default in 9.0. Unless you configure it otherwise, these files live in
~/.local/share/Odoo/filestore.

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Installing the Odoo Development Environment

If the backup gets large, downloading it may fail, either because the
Odoo server itself is not able to handle the large file in memory or if the
server runs behind a reverse proxy (see Chapter 16, Server Deployment)
because there is a limit to the size of HTTP responses set in the proxy.
Conversely, for the same reasons, you will likely experience issues with
the database restore operation. When you start running into these issues,
it is time to invest in a more robust external backup solution.

There is more...
Experienced Odoo developers generally don't use the database management interface, and
perform the operations from the command line. To initialize a new database with demo data
for instance, the following one-liner can be used:
$ createdb testdb && odoo.py -d testdb

The additional bonus of this command line is that you can request installation of addons
while you are at it using for instance -i sale,purchase,stock (more on this in Chapter 2,
Managing Odoo Server Instances).
To duplicate a database, stop the server, and run the following command:
$ createdb -T dbname newdbname
$ cd ~/.local/share/Odoo/filestore # adapt if you have changed the data_
dir
$ cp -r dbname newdbname
$ cd -

Note that in the context of development, the file store is often omitted.
The use of createdb -T only works if there are no active sessions
on the database, which means you have to shut down your Odoo
server before duplicating the database from the command line.

To remove an instance, run the following command:

$ dropdb dbname
$ rm -rf ~/.local/share/Odoo/filestore/dbname

To create a backup (assuming the PostgreSQL server is running locally), use the following
command:
$ pg_dump -Fc -f dbname.dump dbname
$ tar cjf dbname.tgz dbname.dump ~/.local/share/Odoo/filestore/dbname
18

Chapter 1
To restore the backup, run the following command:
$ tar xf dbname.tgz
$ pg_restore -C -d dbname dbname.dump

Caution!
If your Odoo instance uses a different user to connect to the database
you need to pass -U username so that the correct user is the owner
of the restored database.

Storing the instance configuration in a file

The odoo.py script has dozens of options, and it is tedious to remember them all and to
remember to set them properly when starting the server. Fortunately, it is possible to store
them all in a configuration file and to only specify by hand the ones you want to alter, for
example, for development.

How to do it...
To generate a configuration file for your Odoo instance, run the following command:
$ odoo.py --save --config myodoo.cfg --stop-after-init

You can add additional options, and their values will be saved in the generated file. All the
unset options will be saved with their default value set. To get a list of possible options, use:
$ odoo.py --help | less

This will provide you with some help about what the various options perform. To convert from
the command line form to the configuration form, use the long option name, remove the
leading dashes, and convert the dashes in the middle to underscores: --without-demo
becomes without_demo. This works for most options, but there are a few exceptions listed
in the next section.
Edit the file myodoo.cfg (use the table in the following section for some parameters you may
want to change). Then to start the server with the saved options, run the following command:
$ odoo.py -c myodoo.cfg

The --config option is commonly abbreviated as -c

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Installing the Odoo Development Environment

How it works...
At start up, Odoo loads its configuration in three passes. First a set of default values for all
options is initialized from the source code. Then the configuration is parsed, and any value
defined in the file overrides the defaults. Finally, the command-line options are analyzed and
their values override the configuration obtained from the previous pass.
As mentioned earlier, the names of the configuration variables can be found from the names
of the command-line options by removing the leading dashes and converting the middle
dashes to underscores. There are a few exceptions, notably:
Command line
--db-filter
--no-xmlrpc
--database
--debug
--i18n-import / --i18n-export

Configuration file
dbfilter
xmlrpc = True / False
db_name
debug_mode = True / False
Unavailable

Here is a list of options commonly set through the configuration file:

Option
without_demo

Format

addons_path

Comma
separated list of
paths

A list of directory names in which the server will

look for addons (see Chapter 2, Managing Odoo
Server instances).

admin_passwd

Text

The master password (see previous recipe).

data_dir

Path to a
directory

A directory in which the server will store session

information, addons downloaded from the
Internet, and documents if you enable the file
store.

db_host

Host name

The name of the server running the PostgreSQL

server. Use False to use local Unix Domain
sockets, and localhost to use TCP sockets
locally.

db_user

Database user
login

db_password

Database user
password

20

Usage
Prevents module demo data from being loaded.

This is generally empty if db_host is False and

db_user has the same name as the user running
the server. Read the man page of pg_hba.conf
for more information on this.

Chapter 1
Option
database

Format

Usage

Database name

Used to set the database name on which some

commands operate by default). This does not limit
the databases on which the server will act. See the
following dbfilter option for this.

dbfilter

A regular
expression

The expression should match the name of the

databases considered by the server. If you run
the website, it should match a single database,
so it will look like ^databasename$. More
information on this is in Chapter 16, Server
Deployment.

xmlrpc_interface

IP address
of a network
interface

Defaults to 0.0.0.0, meaning the server listens

on all interfaces

xmlrpc_port
longpolling_port

Port number

The ports on which the Odoo server will listen.

You will need to specify both to run multiple Odoo
servers on the same host. longpolling_port
is only used if workers is not 0.

logfile

Path to a file

The file in which Odoo will write its logs.

log_level

Log verbosity
level

Specify the level of logging. Accepted values (in

increasing verbosity order): critical, error,
warn, info, debug, debug_rpc, debug_rpc_
answer, debug_sql.

workers

Integer

The number of worker processes. See Chapter 16,

Server Deployment, for more information.

no_database_list

True / False

Set to True to disable listing of databases.

See Chapter 16, Server Deployment, for more
information.

There is more...
The parsing of the configuration file by Odoo is done using the Python ConfigParser
module. This module supports defining values for variables from the values of other variables
using the %(section.variable)s notation. You can omit section if the value comes from
the same section or if it is defined in the special [DEFAULT] section.
For instance, if you want to define the database login to be the same as the database name,
you can write the following in your Odoo configuration file:
[options]
db_name = projectname
db_user = %(options.db_name)s

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Installing the Odoo Development Environment

A very common use is to define a common prefix for the paths of the addons:
[DEFAULT]
project = /home/odoo/projects/project1
env = dev
prefix = %(project)s/%(env)s
[options]
addons-path = %(prefix)s/odoo/addons,%(prefix)s/OCA/server-tools
data_dir = %(prefix)s/data_dir

Activating the Odoo developer tools

When using Odoo as a developer, you need to know how to activate Developer Mode in the
web interface to access the advanced settings menu and developer information.

How to do it...
To activate Developer Mode in the web interface:
1. Connect to your instance and authenticate (not necessarily as admin; this function is
available to all users, but the Administrator has more tools available).
2. Click on the down arrow next to your user name in the top right corner of the page .

3. In the drop-down menu, click on About.

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Chapter 1
4. In the dialog box which is displayed, click on Activate the developer mode in the top
right corner.

It is also possible to activate the developer mode by editing the URL:

before the # sign, insert ?debug=. For instance, if you are starting from:
http://localhost:8069/web#menu_id=102&action=94, then you
need to change this to: http://localhost:8069/web?debug=#menu_
id=102&action=94.

23

Installing the Odoo Development Environment

5. To exit developer mode, you can edit the URL and remove that string, close your
browser tab and open a new one, or use the Leave Debug Mode option at the bottom
of the debug drop-down menu next to the user menu in the top right of the screen.

How it works...
When in developer mode, three things happen:

The JavaScript and CSS code sent to the browser is not minified, which means
that the web development tools of your browser are easy to use for debugging the
JavaScript code (more on this in Chapter 15, Web Client Development).

You get tooltips when hovering over a field in a form view or over a column in list view
providing technical information about the field (internal name, type, and so on).

A drop-down menu with a Bug icon is displayed next to the user's menu in the top
right corner giving access to technical information about the model being displayed,
the various related view definitions, the workflow, custom filter management, and
so on.
Caution!
Test your addons both with and without developer mode, as the
unminified versions of the JavaScript libraries can hide bugs which
only bite you in the minified version.

24

Chapter 1

Updating Odoo from source

We saw in the first recipe how to install Odoo from source by using the git repository. The main
benefit of this setting is being able to update the source code of Odoo using git to get the
latest bug fixes.

Getting ready
Stop any instance currently running with the Odoo source you are about to update.
Make a backup of all the databases you care about in case something goes bad. This is
obviously something you need to do for production databases. See the Managing Odoo server
databases recipe for instructions.
Then make a note of the current version of the source you are running. The best way is to
create a lightweight tag using the following command:
$ cd ~/odoo-dev/odoo
$ git checkout 9.0
$ git tag 9.0-before-update-$(date --iso)

How to do it...
To update the source code of Odoo, use the following command:
$ git pull -ff-only

This will fetch the latest version of the source code committed to the current branch.
To update an instance running on this code, run the following command:
$ odoo.py -c myodoo.cfg --stop-after-init -u base

-u is the shortcut notation for the --update option of odoo.py.

If you don't have a database set in the configuration file, you will have to add the -d
database_name option. That command is to be repeated for all the instances running
with this version of the source code.

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Installing the Odoo Development Environment

If the update fails, don't panic, you have backups.
1. Read the error message carefully. Save it to a file, as it will be useful to make a bug
report later.
2. If you cannot figure out what the problem is, restore the service; restore the Odoo
source code to the previous version, which is known to work using the tag you set
before updating the source version:
$ git reset --hard 9.0-before-update-$(date --iso)

3. Drop the broken databases and restore them from the backups you made (see the
Managing Odoo server databases recipe for instructions).
4. Restart your instances and tell your users that the upgrade has been postponed.
Note that in real life, this should never happen on a production database,
because you would have tested the upgrade beforehand on a copy of the
database, fixed the issues, and only done the upgrade on the production
server after making sure that it runs flawlessly. But sometimes, you still get
surprises, so even if you are really sure, make a backup.

How it works...
Updating the source code is done by making sure we are on the correct branch using git
checkout, and then fetching the new revisions using git pull. The --ff-only option will
cause a failure if you have local commits not present in the remote repository. If this happens
and you want to keep your changes, you can use git pull (without --ff-only) to merge
the remote changes with yours; otherwise, use git reset --hard origin/9.0 to force
the update, discarding your local modifications.
The update command uses the following options:

-c: specify the configuration file

--stop-after-init: stop the instance when the update is over

-u base or --update base: requests the update of the base module

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Chapter 1
When updating a module, Odoo does the following:

It updates the database structure for the models defined in the module for which the
structure changes. For updates on the stable branch of Odoo, there should be no
such changes, but this can happen for your own addons or third party addons.

It updates the database records stored in data files of the module, most notably
the views. It then recursively updates the installed modules which have declared a
dependency on the module.

Since the base module is an implicit dependency of all Odoo modules, updating it will trigger
an update of all the installed modules in your instance. To update all installed modules, the
alias all can be used instead of base.

27

Get more information Odoo Development Cookbook

Where to buy this book

You can buy Odoo Development Cookbook from the Packt Publishing website.
Alternatively, you can buy the book from Amazon, BN.com, Computer Manuals and most internet
book retailers.
Click here for ordering and shipping details.

www.PacktPub.com

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