Odoo Development Tools

This repository contains a few tools you can use to perform various tasks related to Odoo development. The tools are primarily aimed at Odoo employees, but they can also be useful for community contributors.

The quickest way to make the tools available is to clone this repository to your computer and add it to your PATH in your shell's rc-file, like .bashrc or .zshrc.

export PATH="$HOME/code/odoo-dev:$PATH"

You can run any command with the -h or --help option to see all possible options.

Table of Contents

Tool	Purpose
o-dev-start and o-dev-stop	Run/Test Odoo in a fully configured Docker container
o-multiverse	Setup a workspace to work in multiple branches of Odoo
o-export-pot	Export .pot files for one or more modules
o-update-po	Update .po files for one or more modules

o-dev-start and o-dev-stop ^(Bash)

Using these tools you can automatically start and stop a fully configured Docker container to run your Odoo server(s) during development.

Important

These tools require Docker Desktop to be installed on your system.

The Docker container is carefully configured to resemble Odoo's SaaS and SH servers and thus tries to eliminate discrepancies between your local system and the production server.

You can easily start a development container like this:

$ o-dev-start -w ~/code/odoo

This will build a Docker image (if no previous one exists), start a container and mount the ~/code/odoo directory inside your container at /code to allow live code updates while developing. It will then open an interactive shell to the container to allow you to run any odoo-bin command.

Tip

If you want to force a full rebuild of the image, you can run the command with the --build option: o-dev-start --build .... If you want to reuse existing cached layers, you can use the --build-with-cache option.

The container exposes ports 8069, 8071, 8072 and 8073, so you could run up to 4 Odoo instances simultaneously (each on one of the ports) and access them from your host machine at http://localhost:<port>.

The command will also start a separate PostgreSQL container that you can access from your host machine at localhost:5432 with odoo as username and password. Inside your other Docker container, the hostname of the PostgreSQL server is db.

The container contains some helpful aliases that you can use to run and debug Odoo from your workspace (either /code or /code/<branch> if you're using the multiverse setup). They contain the right configuration to connect to the PostgreSQL database and set very high time limits by default (useful for debugging). You can check them in docker/.bash_aliases.

Running Odoo (from within the workspace folder)

• o-bin can be used instead of odoo/odoo-bin with the same arguments.
• o-bin-c already contains the addons path for a Community server.
• o-bin-e already contains the addons path for an Enterprise server.

Upgrading Odoo (from within the workspace folder)

• o-bin-up can be used instead of odoo/odoo-bin --upgrade-path=... with the same arguments.
• o-bin-up-c already contains the addons path for a Community server.
• o-bin-up-e already contains the addons path for an Enterprise server.

Debugging Odoo (from within the workspace folder)

• o-bin-deb can be used instead of odoo/odoo-bin with the same arguments, and starts a debug session using debugpy and waits for your local debugger to connect to it before starting.

Tip

A compatible Visual Studio Code debug configuration is available in multiverse-config/.vscode/launch.json

• o-bin-deb-c already contains the addons path for a Community server.
• o-bin-deb-e already contains the addons path for an Enterprise server.

The most common PostgreSQL commands have also been aliased to use the right database and credentials, so you could just run e.g. dropdb <database>.

Examples:

$ o-bin-e -d my_database -i account_accountant

$ o-bin-deb --addons-path=odoo/addons -d existing_database

If you would start an Odoo server without the aliases, you would need to provide the database information like this:

$ ./odoo-bin --db_host=db --db_user=odoo --db_password=odoo ...

When you're done with the container, you can exit the session by running the exit command. At this point, the container will still be running and you can access it again using the same o-dev-start command.

If you want to stop the containers and clean them up, you simply run:

$ o-dev-stop

More details on the Docker configuration

The configuration for the Docker containers is located in the docker folder in this repository. The compose.yaml file defines an odoo service that runs the development container with the right configuration and file mounts, and a db service that runs the PostgreSQL server.

The development container configuration is laid out in the Dockerfile and does the following:

• Use Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) or 24.04 (Noble Numbat) as a base image.
• Install all required and useful Debian packages to develop and run Odoo.
• Install all required node modules.
• Set up an odoo user and his environment to use in the container.
• Install all pip packages not available as Debian packages.

o-multiverse ^(Bash)

This tool allows to set up an Odoo "Multiverse" environment in order to have all relevant versions of Odoo checked out at the same time. That way you can easily work on tasks in different versions without having to switch branches, or compare behaviors in different versions easily.

The setup makes use of the git worktree feature to prevent having multiple full clones of the repositories for each version. The git history is only checked out once, and the only extra data you have per branch are the actual source files.

The easiest way to set this up is by creating a directory for your multiverse setup and then run the command in that directory. (Make sure you set up your GitHub SSH key beforehand!)

$ mkdir ~/code/odoo
$ cd ~/code/odoo
$ o-multiverse

You can run the command as many times as you want. It will skip already existing branches and repositories and only renew their configuration (when passed the --reset-config argument).

Note

The branches checked out by default are: 15.0, 16.0, 17.0, saas-17.2, saas-17.4 and master. You can override this using the -b or --branches option with a comma-separated list of branches.

$ o-multiverse -b 15.0,16.0,17.0

Note

The repositories checked out by default are: odoo, enterprise, design-themes, documentation, internal, upgrade and upgrade-util. If you want to exclude any of these (because you don't need them or don't have access to them), you can use the -e or --exclude option with a comma-separated list of repositories to exclude (from the list defined above).

$ o-multiverse -e design-themes,documentation,internal

Tip

If you're using Visual Studio Code, you can provide the --vscode flag and the script will copy some default config, including recommended plugins, plugin configurations, debug configurations (including one that works with the Docker container started via o-dev-start).

$ o-multiverse --vscode

The o-multiverse command will do the following:

1. Clone all bare repositories that have multiple branches (odoo, enterprise, design-themes and documentation) to a .multiverse-source/<repository> folder (we don't need the source files themselves here). We set them up in a way that we can correctly create worktrees for each branch. We add the remote origin (git@github.com:odoo/<repository>.git) for all repositories and the remote dev (git@github.com:odoo-dev/<repository>.git) for the odoo, enterprise and design-themes repositories only.

2. Clone the single-branch repositories (internal, upgrade and upgrade-util) to the root of your multiverse directory.

3. Create a directory per branch in your multiverse directory, and a directory per multi-branch repository inside each branch directory. We use git worktree add to add a worktree for the correct branch for each repository.

4. Create a symlink to each single-branch repository in each branch directory, since they all use the same master branch of these repositories.

5. Copy the pyproject.toml file into each branch folder to have the right Ruff configuration.

6. Set up a Python virtual environment (venv) in the .venv folder and install all required dependencies. (You can use this environment from the branch's directory using source .venv/bin/activate.)

7. Set up Javascript tooling for the odoo and enterprise repositories using the web addon's tooling directory.

After that is done, your directory structure should look a bit like this:

<multiverse-folder>
├── .worktree-source
│   ├── odoo (bare)
│   ├── enterprise (bare)
│   ├── design-themes (bare)
│   └── documentation (bare)
├── 15.0
│   └── ...
├── 16.0
│   └── ...
├── 17.0
│   ├── .venv (Python virtual environment)
│   ├── odoo (17.0)
│   ├── enterprise (17.0)
│   ├── design-themes (17.0)
│   ├── documentation (17.0)
│   ├── internal (symlink to ../internal)
│   ├── upgrade (symlink to ../upgrade)
│   ├── upgrade-util (symlink to ../upgrade-util)
│   ├── pyproject.toml
│   └── requirements.txt
├── saas-17.1
│   └── ...
├── saas-17.2
│   └── ...
├── saas-17.4
│   └── ...
├── master
│   └── ...
├── internal (master)
├── upgrade (master)
└── upgrade-util (master)

The script will log every step to the console and provide the paths of the generated or existing folders to easily open any of them.

o-export-pot ^(Python)

This tool allows to export clean .pot files for one or more modules using just one command.

The most common use would be to run this (from the workspace folder containing both your odoo and enterprise repositories):

$ o-export-pot -s -i -m account,account_payment

With these options, the script will:

1. Start a local Odoo Community or Enterprise server (-s) , depending on the modules you provided;

Important

Always try to export Community and Enterprise modules separately, so there can't be any pollution from Enterprise overrides in Community .pot files!

2. Install (-i) the modules you provided after the argument -m (comma-separated list without spaces);

3. Export the .pot file of each of these modules and save them in their respective i18n directories;

4. Stop the Odoo server and remove the temporary database.

The script will log every step to the console and provide the paths of the generated files to easily open any of them.

Tip

If you want to use the script against a PostgreSQL server that is not on your local machine (e.g. using a Docker container), you can provide these options: --db_host db --db_port 5432 --db_user odoo --db_password odoo (e.g.).

o-update-po ^(Python)

This tool allows to update the .po files for one or more modules according to its .pot file using just one command.

The most common use would be to run this (from the workspace folder containing both your odoo and enterprise repositories):

$ o-update-po -m account,account_payment

You can specify which languages you want to update by using the -l argument with a comma-separated list (without spaces) of language codes. By default it updates them all.

$ o-update-po -m account,account_payment -l fr,es,es_419

Important

You need to have the gettext tools installed on your system via your favorite package manager.

$ sudo apt-get install gettext  # Ubuntu, Linux Mint ...
$ brew install gettext  # macOS

The script will locate the .po files per module and use the msgmerge and msgattrib commands to update them according to the .pot file in the module's i18n directory. Make sure it is up to date by first running o-export-pot.

The script will log every step to the console and provide the paths of the updated files to easily open any of them.