What you need for this book

The set up recipes in Chapter 1, Installing the Odoo Development Environment, and Chapter 15, Web Client Development, expect that you are working on a server running Debian GNU/Linux, or a derivative distribution such as Ubuntu, in a reasonably up-to-date release. If you are running another distribution, things should be fairly straightforward; the main differences should be in the names of the packages to install, and possibly the location of the configuration files of PostgreSQL and Nginx.

If your workstation is running Windows or MacOS, we advise you to set up a Debian virtual machine to work with Odoo. While it is possible to develop natively on Windows or Mac, having a development environment as close as possible to the deployment environment is a good way to avoid nasty surprises and GNU/Linux is the recommended deployment platform for Odoo.

Is there a recommended Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Odoo? This is a frequently asked question by newcomers. The best answer is to use whatever tool you are familiar with. Popular choices include Eclipse or PyCharm, but a very high number of experimented developers, including the core Odoo developers, use just a programming text editor such as vim, GNU emacs, or Sublime Text to have syntax highlighting and useful helpers such as automatic indentation, while using the Python debugger for debugging. It is recommended to start with the basic tools because IDEs have a tendency to hide complexity you should be familiar with in order to fix the harder problems.