How to do it…

To create the proposed instance layout, you need to perform the following steps:

1. Create one directory per instance:

   $ mkdir ~/odoo-dev/projectname
   $ cd ~/odoo-dev/projectname

2. Create a Python virtualenv object in a subdirectory called env/:

   $ python3 -m venv env

3. Create some subdirectories, as follows:

   $ mkdir src local bin filestore logs

   The functions of the subdirectories are as follows:

   • src/: This contains the clone of Odoo itself, as well as the various third-party add-on projects (we have added Odoo source code to the next step in this recipe).
   • local/: This is used to save your instance-specific add-ons.
   • bin/: This includes various helper executable shell scripts.
   • filestore/: This is used as a file store.
   • logs/ (optional): This is used to store the server log files.
4. Clone Odoo and install the requirements (refer to Chapter 1, Installing the Odoo Development Environment, for details on this):

   $ git clone -b 14.0 --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/odoo/odoo.git src/odoo
   $ env/bin/pip3 install -r src/odoo/requirements.txt

5. Save the following shell script as bin/odoo:

   #!/bin/sh ROOT=$(dirname $0)/..
   PYTHON=$ROOT/env/bin/python3 ODOO=$ROOT/src/odoo/odoo-bin
   $PYTHON $ODOO -c $ROOT/projectname.cfg "$@" exit $?

6. Make the script executable:

   $ chmod +x bin/odoo

7. Create an empty dummy local module:

   $ mkdir -p local/dummy
   $ touch local/dummy/  init  .py
   $ echo '{"name": "dummy", "installable": False}' >\ local/dummy/  manifest  .py

8. Generate a configuration file for your instance:

   $ bin/odoo --stop-after-init --save \
   --addons-path src/odoo/odoo/addons,src/odoo/addons,local \
   --data-dir filestore

9. Add a .gitignore file, which is used to tell GitHub to exclude given directories so that Git will ignore these directories when you commit the code, for example, filestore/, env/, logs/, and src/:

   # dotfiles, with exceptions:
   .*
   !.gitignore
   # python compiled files
   *.py[co]
   # emacs backup files
   *~
   # not tracked subdirectories
   /env/
   /src/
   /filestore/
   /logs/

10. Create a Git repository for this instance and add the files you've added to Git:

    $ git init
    $ git add .
    $ git commit -m "initial version of projectname"