Getting ready

We need Odoo installed and a directory for our custom modules.

We will assume that Odoo is installed at ~/odoo-dev/odoo and our custom modules will be at ~/odoo-dev/local-addons.

How to do it…

The scaffold command is used from the command line:

This is how the generated addon module should look like:

$ tree my_scaffolded
my_scaffolded
├── 
controllers.py
├── demo.xml
├── __init__.py
├── models.py
├── __openerp__.py
├── security
│
 └── ir.model.access.csv
└── templates.xml

How it works…

The scaffold command creates the skeleton for a new module based on a template.

By default, the new module is created in the current working directory, but we can provide a specific directory where to create the module, passing it as an additional parameter. For example:

$ ~/odoo-dev/odoo/odoo.py scaffold my_module ~/odoo-dev/local-addons

A default template is used but a theme template is also available, for website theme authoring. To choose a specific template, the -t option can be used. We are also allowed to use a path for a directory with a template.

This means that we can use our own templates with the scaffold command. The built-in themes can be used as a guide, and they can be found in the Odoo subdirectory ./openerp/cli/templates. To use our own template, we could use something like this:

$ ~/odoo-dev/odoo/odoo.py scaffold -t path/to/template my_module

There's more…

Unfortunately, the default template does not adhere to the current Odoo guidelines. We could create our own template by copying the default one, at odoo/openerp/cli/templates/default/, and modifying to better suit the structure described in the Organizing the module file structure recipe. A command similar to this could get us started on that:

$ cp -r ~/odoo-dev/odoo/openerp/cli/templates/default ~/
odoo-dev/template

Later, we can use it with the following command:

$ ~/odoo-dev/odoo/odoo.py scaffold -t ~/odoo-dev/template my_module