Odoo has Debian/Ubuntu packages available for installation. With these, you get a working server process that automatically starts on system boot. This installation process is straightforward, and you can find all you need at http://nightly.odoo.com.
While this is an easy and convenient way to install Odoo, here we prefer running from version-controlled source code since this provides better control over what is deployed.
Sooner or later, your server will need upgrades and patches. A version controlled repository can be of great help when the time comes.
We use git to get our code from a repository, just like we did to install the development environment. For example:
$ git clone https://github.com/odoo/odoo.git -b 8.0 --depth=1
This command gets from GitHub the branch 8.0 source code into an odoo/ subdirectory. At the time of writing, 8.0 is the default branch, so the -b 8.0 option is optional. The --depth=1 option was used to get a shallow copy...