DEV Community

Coding Dodo
Coding Dodo

Posted on • Originally published at codingdodo.com on

Install and Deploy Odoo 14 from source on DigitalOcean

#odoo #odoo14 #ubuntu20 #deployment

Install and Deploy Odoo 14 from source on DigitalOcean

In this tutorial, we will deploy a production-ready Odoo 14 instance. Install it from GitHub source on a brand new DigitalOcean Droplet Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) x64. What we will do:

  • Going through DigitalOcean registration
  • Installing all the Ubuntu 20.4 requirements necessary to install Odoo from the source
  • Using Pyenv to prepare our server for multiple python versions and virtualenvs in case you want to host other versions of Odoo
  • Creating odoo user and making Odoo run as a service
  • Install Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate
  • Making Odoo multiprocess and using Nginx as a reverse proxy
  • Basic security with ufw

DigitalOcean offers you 100€ credit to use in 6 months since you can create machines and destroy them quickly it's a great place to experiment with Odoo installs or to choose it as your production server!

Creating a DigitalOcean account

First of all, go to DigitalOcean and create an account using the link

Install and Deploy Odoo 14 from source on DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean Register

Create your credentials, validate your email and follow the steps until you arrive on that page

Install and Deploy Odoo 14 from source on DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean Register Choose Control panel

Here it can get a bit confusing because most of the links direct you to the DigitalOcean platform but we want the regular dashboard so click on Explore our control panel

When on the Control Panel click on Get Started with a Droplet or Create / Droplet to arrive on this screen

Install and Deploy Odoo 14 from source on DigitalOcean
Create Ubuntu Droplet

Choose Ubuntu 20.04 and choose the right machine based on your needs. Remember that you are only billed for the time that the machine is up so you can choose a good machine and destroy it later. Choose at least 2 CPUs or everything will feel very slow.

Scrolling down you will see a space to add your ssh-key

Install and Deploy Odoo 14 from source on DigitalOcean
Adding the SSH KEY

Adding SSH Key

If you don't have an SSH Key yet you have to generate it with the command. You probably already have an id_rsa.pub file in your .ssh folder. For this example, we will create a new SSH key that will be used to connect to our DigitalOcean Droplets. Feel free to skip that part or read it to create your first key or handle multiple ssh keys.

ssh-keygen -C "contact@codingdodo.com"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

When prompted for the name of the file we choose that

/Users/codingdodo/.ssh/id_rsa_codingdodo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Show the content of the newly generated key:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa_codingdodo.pub
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

On DigitalOcean, click on New SSH Key and copy/paste the content printed out. Scroll down more and click on Create Droplet. It will take a minute then your Droplet will be ready

Install and Deploy Odoo 14 from source on DigitalOcean
Droplet is Ready

Copy the IP Address , we will add it to our SSH config file to make things easier for us. If you handle multiple SSH Keys this is a nice way to handle with which SSH Key you connect to each server.

vim ~/.ssh/config
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Add this section with your IP address and the name of the public key you created.

 Host testingdodo
   Hostname 143.198.123.151
   User root
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_codingdodo
   IdentitiesOnly yes
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

We name our Host testingdodo so in our shell, we can type this shortcut to ssh into the machine.

ssh testingdodo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

And answer yes to the security prompt, and you will be logged in

Welcome to Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.4.0-51-generic x86_64)

...

root@ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-intel-nyc1-01:~#
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Ubuntu 20.4 Prerequesites

We start by updating our packages

apt update
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Installing PostgreSQL 

apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

We will later create a Unix user named Odoo, so we will create a PostgreSQL user with the same name. If you would prefer a different name, remember to keep that consistency to make things easier when you come back later to your environment.

su - postgres
createuser --interactive -P odoo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

With the --interactive flag, PostgreSQL will ask us for a password and the privileges that will be given to our odoo PostgreSQL user.

Enter password for new role:
Enter it again:
Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) n
Shall the new role be allowed to create databases? (y/n) y
Shall the new role be allowed to create more new roles? (y/n) n
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Next, we will already create that database that will hold our Odoo 14 instance. In this example, it's gonna be named coding_dodo.

createdb -O odoo codingdodo_demo
exit
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The -O flag represents the owner of the database, we choose odoo because it's the name of the PostgreSQL user we created just before

Wkhtmltopdf

Wkhtmltopdf is used by Odoo to generate documents and is a necessary evil. We will pull the deb of version 0.12.6-2 from Github and install it

wget https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/packaging/releases/download/0.12.6-1/wkhtmltox_0.12.6-1.bionic_amd64.deb
apt install ./wkhtmltox_0.12.6-1.bionic_amd64.deb
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Python dev dependencies, git, Node, and other requirements 

apt install -y build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev \
libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev wget curl llvm libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev \
xz-utils tk-dev libffi-dev liblzma-dev python-openssl git libpq-dev libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev ccze node-less
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Creating the Unix odoo user 

useradd -m -U -r -s /bin/bash odoo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

-r indicate that it's a system account so useradd will not create a home directory for such a user. We want a folder so we use -m

-U create a group and -s specify the shell that will be used.

Or if you don't want to have /home/odoo created to hold your odoo install and would prefer a different directory. This is an example that will create the home directory in /opt for example.

useradd -m -d /opt/odoo -U -r -s /bin/bash odoo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

-d [path] indicates we want to create a home but in different place.

Preparing a good Python environment with Pyenv

Log in as the odoo user

The pyenv will be installed as the odoo system user. That user is gonna run the odoo instance as a service later.

su - odoo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Installing pyenv 

curl https://pyenv.run | bash
echo 'export PATH="/home/odoo/.pyenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(pyenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec $SHELL
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Installing python 3.9.2 

pyenv install 3.9.2
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Depending on the CPU power you choose, it may take some time, but in the end, you should see:

Installed Python-3.9.2 to /home/odoo/.pyenv/versions/3.9.2
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Creating the virtualenv 

pyenv virtualenv 3.9.2 odoo-14-env
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Installing Odoo from GitHub source

Creating a folder for our custom addons (Optional) 

mkdir /home/odoo/odoo-14-custom-addons
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

This is the folder you will use to store your custom addons. Be careful if you add the custom addon patch to the --addons-path command-line argument and there are no valid addons inside, it will not work.

To make it work we will clone our own module inside that folder

cd /home/odoo/odoo-14-custom-addons
git clone https://github.com/Coding-Dodo/web_widget_markdown.git
cd ~/
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Pulling Odoo 14 and activating the virtualenv

We will pull Odoo version 14 with the -b flag for the branch and put it in a folder named odoo-14

git clone -b 14.0 --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/odoo/odoo.git odoo-14
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Since we created our virtualenv called odoo-14-env, we will "park" it in the odoo-14 folder we just created. With that every time we cd into this folder it will activate our virtualenv.

cd odoo-14
pyenv local odoo-14-env
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The prompt should change and you should see (odoo-14-env) odoo@ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-intel-nyc1-01

Installing python dependencies 

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install setuptools wheel
pip install -r requirements.txt -e .
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

If you see any error please refer to the part "Python dev dependencies, git, Node and other requirements" and make sure you installed everything.

Launching Odoo for the first time to test and generate a config file

We will test launch Odoo with some command-line arguments that will be saved in our Odoo configuration file

./odoo-bin --database=codingdodo_demo --db_user=odoo --db_password=codingdodo -i base --without-demo=all --save -c /home/odoo/.odoorc_codingdodo_demo --stop-after-init
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

If you chose to create a custom addons folder and it's not empty. The command will be


./odoo-bin --database=codingdodo_demo --db_user=odoo --db_password=codingdodo -i base --addons-path="/home/odoo/odoo-14/addons,/home/odoo/odoo-14-custom-addons" --without-demo=all --save -c /home/odoo/.odoorc_codingdodo_demo --stop-after-init
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

We directly typed the db name, user, and password and initialized it with the iflag.

--without-demo=all is used because we are installing a production-ready environment. If you want demo data, omit that flag.

With the -c flag we told odoo where the config file will be /home/odoo/.odoorc_codingdodo_demo

The --save flag is used to save everything we just typed into the newly created config file.

(Optional) Updating config file admin_passwd with a random strong password:

If you want to quickly change the password inside your config file

sed -i "s/\badmin\b/$(openssl rand -base64 32 | awk '{print $1}')/g" /home/odoo/.odoorc_codingdodo_demo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

This will replace the line admin_passwd = admin with a new password randomly generated via OpenSSL.

To check what the new admin_passwd is:

cat /home/odoo/.odoorc_codingdodo_demo | grep admin_passwd

...
admin_passwd = C4Yiyiez4CHMl5tsmRHVZHflfnITd3nF5oXh8l3ZPc8=
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Keep it somewhere safe because after running the instance it will be hashed.

Create the logs directory

We want our log files to be inside /var/log/odoo/ so we create that folder and give odoo user access to it.

mkdir /var/log/odoo
touch /var/log/odoo/odoo-14.log
chown odoo: /var/log/odoo
chown -R odoo: /var/log/odoo/*

vim /home/odoo/.odoorc_codingdodo_demo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Modify the config file to reflect that change

logfile = /var/log/odoo/odoo-14.log
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Odoo as service

Log out of odoo user and create a service file

exit
vim /etc/systemd/system/odoo-14.service
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Inside the file

[Unit]
Description=Odoo14
Requires=postgresql.service
After=network.target postgresql.service

[Service]
Type=simple
SyslogIdentifier=odoo-14
PermissionsStartOnly=true
User=odoo
Group=odoo
ExecStart=/home/odoo/.pyenv/versions/odoo-14-env/bin/python /home/odoo/odoo-14/odoo-bin -c /home/odoo/.odoorc_codingdodo_demo
StandardOutput=journal+console

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Reload service

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable --now odoo-14
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Check status:

systemctl status odoo-14
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Install Nginx and add SSL with Let's Encrypt

Installing Nginx 

apt install nginx
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Let's Encrypt with Certbot

Certbot will be used to install our first certificate and to renew it every months

apt install certbot
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Generate a new set of 2048 bit DH parameters by typing the following command:

sudo openssl dhparam -out /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem 2048
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Let's Encrypt Nginx Snippet

Let's Encrypt need to do its acme-challenge to validate our domain name and creating the certificate with certbot. If we plan to install multiple instances / different domain names pointing to this server, it is a good habit to isolate the let's encrypt acme-challenge location to its custom snippet.

mkdir -p /var/lib/letsencrypt/.well-known
chgrp www-data /var/lib/letsencrypt
chmod g+s /var/lib/letsencrypt
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

We create a Let's Encrypt snippet

vim /etc/nginx/snippets/letsencrypt.conf
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

With this content

location ^~ /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
  allow all;
  root /var/lib/letsencrypt/;
  default_type "text/plain";
  try_files $uri =404;
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

SSL Conf Nginx Snippet 

vim /etc/nginx/snippets/ssl.conf
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Copy-paste that content

ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem;

ssl_session_timeout 1d;
ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
ssl_session_tickets off;

ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
ssl_ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;

ssl_stapling on;
ssl_stapling_verify on;
resolver 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 valid=300s;
resolver_timeout 30s;

add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains" always;
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Create A Record with your DNS Provider pointing to the Droplet IP

For the following parts, you must have a domain name that will point to your droplet or else the acme-challenge of Let's Encrypt will not pass and you will not have SSL so the final Nginx config file will not apply to you.

Install and Deploy Odoo 14 from source on DigitalOcean
Adding a domain name

Here we created a subdomain of codingdodo.com with an A record pointing to our Droplet IP Value.

Our final address will be odoo-14.codingdodo.com

Installing the Let's Encrypt certificate

In case the Odoo service is still running.

service odoo-14 stop
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Basic Nginx Conf file to pass the Certbot acme-challenge 

cd /etc/nginx/site-available
vim odoo-14.codingdodo.com
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

We will first create a basic Nginx conf file to pass certbot acme-challenge:

upstream odoo_14 {
 server 127.0.0.1:8069;
}

upstream odoochat_14 {
 server 127.0.0.1:8072;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name odoo-14.codingdodo.com;
    include snippets/letsencrypt.conf;
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Symlink your site declaration from site-available to site-enabled.

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/odoo-14.codingdodo.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/odoo-14.codingdodo.com
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Always test the config with nginx -t and if everything is okay we reload Nginx

service nginx reload
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Certbot acme-challenge

It is now time to create our SSL certificate.

certbot certonly --agree-tos --email contact@codingdodo.com --webroot -w /var/lib/letsencrypt/ -d odoo-14.codingdodo.com
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

You should see

 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/odoo-14.codingdodo.com/fullchain.pem
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Managing Auto renew

Let's Encrypt already created a cron in the crontab but Nginx needs to reload to take into consideration the new certificate so we will edit this file

vim /etc/letsencrypt/cli.ini
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

And add the line at the end.

deploy-hook = systemctl reload nginx
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

To test if our renew will work we can use the --dry-run flag to test it

certbot renew --dry-run
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Final Nginx site conf for proxy mode multi workers

Now edit the odoo-14.codingdodo.com file again:

vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/odoo-14.codingdodo.com
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 
upstream odoo_14 {
 server 127.0.0.1:8069;
}

upstream odoochat_14 {
 server 127.0.0.1:8072;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name odoo-14.codingdodo.com;
    include snippets/letsencrypt.conf;

    location / {
        return 301 https://odoo-14.codingdodo.com$request_uri;
    }
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2 default_server;
    listen [::]:443;
    server_name odoo-14.codingdodo.com ;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/odoo-14.codingdodo.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/odoo-14.codingdodo.com/privkey.pem;
    ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/odoo-14.codingdodo.com/chain.pem;
    include snippets/ssl.conf;
    include snippets/letsencrypt.conf;

    proxy_buffers 16 64k;
    proxy_buffer_size 128k;

    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X_ODOO_DBFILTER "codingdodo_demo";
    proxy_next_upstream error timeout invalid_header http_500 http_502 http_503 http_504;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://odoo_14;
    }

    location /longpolling {
        proxy_pass http://odoochat_14;
    }

    location ~* /web/static/ {
        proxy_cache_valid 200 60m;
        proxy_buffering on;
        expires 864000;
        proxy_pass http://odoo_14;
    }

    location ~* /website/image/ir.attachment/ {
        proxy_cache_valid 200 60m;
        proxy_buffering on;
        expires 864000;
        proxy_pass http://odoo_14;
    }

    gzip_types text/css text/less text/plain text/xml application/xml application/json application/javascript;
    gzip on;
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Use nginx -t to test the new config and if everything is okay run

service nginx reload
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Updating the Odoo config file 

vim /home/odoo/.odoorc_codingdodo_demo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Now that we have our reverse proxy we need to modify/add these lines

proxy_mode = True
workers = 4
max_cron_threads = 1
limit_memory_hard = 2684354560
limit_memory_soft = 2147483648
limit_request = 8192
limit_time_cpu = 600
limit_time_real = 1200
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The number of workers depends on the RAM and CPU you choose during the creation of your droplet. Refer to this official documentation to calculate the appropriate number of workers.

  • Server with 2 CPU, 4 Thread
  • 30 concurrent users
  • 30 users / 6 = 5 <- theorical number of worker needed
  • (2 * 2) + 1 = 5 <- theorical maximal number of worker
  • We’ll use 4 workers + 1 for cron.
  • RAM = 9 * ((0.8*150) + (0.2*1024)) ~= 3Go RAM for Odoo

Restart Odoo and see logs 

service odoo-14 restart
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Go to https://odoo-14.codingdodo.com and in the meantime on the server check the logs

tail -f /var/log/odoo/odoo-14.log | ccze
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Setting the Firewall 

ufw app list
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

If you followed this guide it should show you :

Available applications:
  Nginx Full
  Nginx HTTP
  Nginx HTTPS
  OpenSSH
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

First, we secure ssh connection

ufw allow OpenSSH
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Now if you have installed Nginx with an SSL certificate

ufw allow 'Nginx Full'
ufw enable
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Create a sudo user for day to day actions 

adduser codingdodo

usermod -aG sudo codingdodo

rsync --archive --chown=codingdodo:codingdodo ~/.ssh /home/codingdodo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

With DigitalOcean we already uploaded our ssh-key to the authorized_keys of the root so we are using Rsync to copy the folder with a new owner.

Wrapping up

This is the final Odoo config file

[options]
addons_path = /home/odoo/odoo-14/addons,/home/odoo/odoo-14-custom-addons
admin_passwd = $pbkdf2-sha512$25000$TwkBoDRGqBUi5LyXMiaE8A$SUyyCVfU1jk0YqiuTbHqVNmT31jw33fyh6tLMkA6t6lLSKpbnutYuQ.dVwQ2wIgWs2hf1OQmhNcHR9ofqGtSFg
csv_internal_sep = ,
data_dir = /home/odoo/.local/share/Odoo
db_host = False
db_maxconn = 64
db_name = codingdodo_demo
db_password = codingdodo
db_port = False
db_sslmode = prefer
db_template = template0
db_user = odoo
dbfilter =
demo = {}
email_from = False
geoip_database = /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLite2-City.mmdb
http_enable = True
http_interface =
http_port = 8069
import_partial =
limit_memory_hard = 2684354560
limit_memory_soft = 2147483648
limit_request = 8192
limit_time_cpu = 60
limit_time_real = 120
limit_time_real_cron = -1
list_db = False
log_db = False
log_db_level = warning
log_handler = :INFO
log_level = info
logfile = /var/log/odoo/odoo-14.log
longpolling_port = 8072
max_cron_threads = 2
osv_memory_age_limit = False
osv_memory_count_limit = False
pg_path =
pidfile =
proxy_mode = True
reportgz = False
screencasts =
screenshots = /tmp/odoo_tests
server_wide_modules = base,web
smtp_password = False
smtp_port = 25
smtp_server = localhost
smtp_ssl = False
smtp_user = False
syslog = False
test_enable = False
test_file =
test_tags = None
transient_age_limit = 1.0
translate_modules = ['all']
unaccent = False
upgrade_path =
without_demo = all
workers = 2
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

And that's it for today. We will still need to do daily backups for our database and our filestore (located at

/home/odoo/.local/share/Odoo/filestore/codingdodo_demo)

Thanks for reading, if you liked this article please consider:

Top comments (0)

Read next

oliverbennet profile image

Top 10 SED Use Cases Every Linux User Should Know

Oliver Bennet -

alvaromontoro profile image

10 Cool CodePen Demos (October 2024)

Alvaro Montoro -

elifnurturk profile image

Custom Toasters in Nuxt with Vue Toastification

Elif Nur Turk -

eleanor_fairfax_5ce95399d profile image

A Better VS Code Plugin than Thunder Client

Mason Carter -