Managing Odoo server databases

We assume that your work environment is set up and you have an instance running. Do not start it using the odoo.py start command shown in the previous recipe, as it configures the server with some options which interfere with multi-database management.

The Odoo database management interface provides tools to create, duplicate, remove, back up, and restore a database. There is also a way to change the master password which is used to protect access to the database management interface.

Set or change the master password

If you've set up your instance with default values, and not yet modified it as explained in the following section, the database management screen will display a warning telling you that the master password is not set, and advising you to set one, with a direct link:

1. To set the Master Password, you can click on that link. You will get a dialog box asking you to provide the new password:
   
2. Type in a non-trivial new password and click on Continue.
3. When the master password is already set, click the Set Master Password button at the bottom of the screen to change it
4. In the displayed dialog box, type the previous master password and the new one, and then click on Continue.

Note

The master password is in the server configuration file under the admin_password key. If the server was started without specifying a configuration file, a new one will be generated in ~/.openerp_serverrc. See the next recipe for more information about the configuration file.

These features, apart from the Change master password screen, run postgresql administration commands on the server and report back through the web interface.

The master password is a very important piece of information which only lives in the Odoo server configuration file and is never stored in the database. There used to be a default value of admin, but using this value is a security liability as it is well known. In Odoo v9, this is identified as an "unset" master password and you get urged to change it when accessing the database administration interface. Even if it is stored in the configuration file under the admin_passwd entry, this is not the same as the password of the admin user; these are two independent passwords: the master password is set for an Odoo server process, which itself can handle multiple database instances, each of which has an independent admin user with his own password.

To create a new database, Odoo uses the PostgreSQL createdb utility and calls the internal Odoo function to initialize the new database in the same way as when you start Odoo on an empty database.

To duplicate a database, Odoo uses the --template option of createdb passing the original database as an argument. This essentially duplicates the structure of the template database in the new database using internal and optimized PostgreSQL routines, which is much faster than creating a backup and restoring it (especially when using the web interface which requires downloading the backup file and uploading it again).

Backup and restore operations use the pg_dump and pg_restore utilities respectively. When using the .zip format, the backup will also include a copy of the file store which contains a copy of the documents when you configure Odoo to not keep these in the database, which is the default in 9.0. Unless you configure it otherwise, these files live in ~/.local/share/Odoo/filestore.

Experienced Odoo developers generally don't use the database management interface, and perform the operations from the command line. To initialize a new database with demo data for instance, the following one-liner can be used:

$ createdb testdb && odoo.py -d testdb

The additional bonus of this command line is that you can request installation of addons while you are at it using for instance -i sale,purchase,stock (more on this in Chapter 2, Managing Odoo Server Instances).

To duplicate a database, stop the server, and run the following command:

$ createdb -T dbname newdbname
$ cd ~/.local/share/Odoo/filestore # adapt if you have changed the data_dir
$ cp -r dbname newdbname
$ cd -

Note that in the context of development, the file store is often omitted.

To remove an instance, run the following command:

$ dropdb dbname
$ rm -rf ~/.local/share/Odoo/filestore/dbname

To create a backup (assuming the PostgreSQL server is running locally), use the following command:

$ pg_dump -Fc -f dbname.dump dbname
$ tar cjf dbname.tgz dbname.dump ~/.local/share/Odoo/filestore/dbname

To restore the backup, run the following command:

$ tar xf dbname.tgz
$ pg_restore -C -d dbname dbname.dump