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

In this chapter, you will learn how to set up the work environment, where we will later build our Odoo applications.

You will also learn how to set up a Debian or Ubuntu system to host our development server instances, and how to install Odoo from the GitHub source code. Then you will learn how to set up file sharing with Samba, allowing you to work on Odoo files from a workstation running Windows or any other operating system.

Odoo is built using the Python programming language and uses the PostgreSQL database for its data storage, so these are the main requirements we should have in our Odoo host.

To run Odoo from source, we will need to install first the Python libraries it depends on. The Odoo source code can then be downloaded from GitHub and executed from source. While we can download a zip or tarball, it's best to get the sources using GitHub, so we'll also have it installed on our Odoo host.