Installing and Organizing the Development Environment

Before we dive into Odoo development, we need to set up our development environment and learn the basic administration tasks for it.

In this chapter, we will learn how to set up the working environment where we will build our Odoo applications. We will set up an Ubuntu system to host the development server instance. This can be a cloud server, a local network server, or a virtual machine in your workstation.

This simplifies the explanation, since we don't have to worry about the specifics of each platform. People not familiar with Ubuntu/Debian should find it easy to follow the steps. People confident with other operating systems, such as CentOS or macOS, should be able to adapt the instructions to their preferred system.

Another benefit from using a remote system for development is that when the time comes to deploy our Odoo solution for production use, we will already be familiar with the techniques to remotely work with that server.

For those more at home with Windows operating systems, we will cover how to set up a virtual machine to host the Odoo server. This is useful for learning since it simulates on your machine a setup where the Odoo server is in a cloud Linux server, which is a common deployment scenario. Of course, you can try other options, such as the all-in-one Windows install. In previous Odoo versions, it shipped with only compiled Python code, but since 11.0 it has the proper source code files and is developer friendly.

We will also learn how to set up file sharing with Samba, which may be a practical solution to work on the Odoo server files from our workstation running Windows or other operating systems.

In case you are using Ubuntu or Debian for your workstation, then things will be simpler for you: your workstation can also act as your server, so you can start setting up Odoo right away.