The simplest method to access the server is using XML-RPC. We can use the xmlrpclib library from Python's standard library for this. Remember that we are programming a client in order to connect to a server, so we need an Odoo server instance running to connect to. In our examples, we will assume that an Odoo server instance is running on the same machine (localhost), but you can use any reachable IP address or server name, if the server is running in a different machine.
Let's have a first contact with the Odoo external API. Start a Python console and type in the following:
>>> import xmlrpclib
>>> srv = 'http://localhost:8069'
>>> common = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('%s/xmlrpc/2/common' % srv)
>>> common.version()
{'server_version_info': [10, 0, 0, 'final', 0, ''], 'server_serie': '10.0', 'server_version': '10.0', 'protocol_version': 1}
Here, we import the xmlrpclib library...