Getting ready

This recipe assumes you have an instance ready, with a configuration file generated as described in Chapter 1, Installing the Odoo Development Environment. The source code of Odoo is available in ~/odoo-dev/odoo, and the configuration file is in ~/odoo-dev/my-instance.cfg.

How to do it…

To add the directory ~/odoo-dev/local-addons to the addons path of the instance, follow these steps:

How it works…

When Odoo is restarted, the configuration file is read. The value of the addons_path variable is expected to be a comma-separated list of directories. Relative paths are accepted, but they are relative to the current working directory, and therefore should be avoided in the configuration file.

At this point, the new addons present in ~/odoo-dev/local-addons are not available in the list of available addon modules of the instance. For this, you need to perform an extra operation explained in the next recipe, Updating the addon modules list.

There's more…

When you call the odoo.py script for the first time to initialize a new database, you can pass the --addons-path command line argument with a comma-separated list of directories. This will initialize the list of available addon modules with all the addons found in the supplied addons path. When you do this, you have to explicitly include the base addons directory (odoo/openerp/addons) as well as the core addons directory (odoo/addons). Be careful—if you put a space after the commas—you will need to quote the list of directories. You can use the --save option to also save the path to the configuration file:

$ odoo/odoo.py -d mydatabase \
--addons-path="odoo/openerp/addons,odoo/addons,local-addons" \
--save -c odoo-project.cfg –stop-after-init

In this case, using relative paths is OK, since they will be converted to absolute paths in the configuration file.