Installing an Odoo 13 Stack on Debian 10

What is Odoo?

Odoo (formerly known as OpenERP) is a self-hosted suite of over 10,000 open source applications for a variety of business needs. A few popular applications for Odoo include CRMs, eCommerce, accounting, inventory, point of sale, and project management. These applications are all fully integrated and can be installed and accessed through a web interface. Using Odoo’s web interface can make it easier to automate and manage your company’s processes.

For simple installations, Odoo and its dependencies can be installed on a single Linode. Our Install Odoo 10 on Ubuntu 16.04 guide has an example of this. However, this single-server setup is not suited for production deployments. This guide covers how to configure an Odoo 13 cluster where the Odoo server and PostgreSQL database are hosted on separate Linodes. This configuration gives you more flexibility and scalability while allowing you to use PostgreSQL database replication for added performance and reliability.

System Requirements

The setup in this guide requires the following minimal Linode specifications:

• A Shared 2GB Linode to install the PostgreSQL 11 database

• A Shared 1GB Linode (Nanode) to install the Odoo 13 web application

Your implementation may need more nodes or higher-memory plans. Your required server resources depend on the number of end-users you want to serve and the number of modules you plan to incorporate. If you’re not sure what size server you need, you can always start with a lower resource tier and then resize your Linodes to a higher plan later on.

All examples in this guide are for Debian 10. If you plan to use a different operating system, adapt the commands as necessary.

Before You Begin

1. Familiarize yourself with our Getting Started guide. Create the Linodes described in the previous System Requirements section of the current guide. Complete the steps for setting your Linodes’ hostname and timezone.

2. This guide uses sudo wherever possible. Complete the sections of our Securing Your Server to create a standard user account, harden SSH access, and remove unnecessary network services.

   Note

   Commands that require elevated privileges are prefixed with sudo. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, you can check our Users and Groups guide.

3. Update your systems:

   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
   

Configure Firewall Rules for Odoo

If you want to configure a firewall for your Linodes, open the following ports:

• Port 22 is the default port for SSH.

• Port 5432 is the default port for PostgreSQL communications.

• Port 6010 is used for Odoo communications.

• Port 8069 is used by Odoo’s webserver.

A convenient way to open these ports is by using the UFW firewall utility. However, this utility is not installed by default. Follow these instructions to install and configure UFW:

1. Install ufw with the following command:

    sudo apt-get install ufw
   

2. Allow traffic on the appropriate ports for each server. These lines allow traffic to those ports from all other hosts:

   • PostgreSQL database server:

       sudo ufw allow 22,6010,5432/tcp
     

   • Odoo 13 application server:

       sudo ufw allow 22,6010,5432,8069/tcp
     

   Note

   You may want to only accept connections from certain hosts/IP addresses. The Advanced Rules section of our UFW guide shows how to specify hosts/IP addresses in your rules.

3. After configuring your ports, enable the firewall:

    sudo ufw enable
   

4. To check on the status of your firewall rules, run:

    sudo ufw status
   

Hostname Assignment

In order to simplify communication between Linodes, set hostnames for each server. This guide uses the following FQDN and hostname conventions:

On each server, append the following lines to the /etc/hosts file. For the second line in each of these snippets, substitute your Linodes’ IP addresses. If both servers are in the same Linode data center, then you can use private IP addresses for each Linode. Otherwise, use the public IP addresses of each Linode. Follow our Find your Linode’s IP Address guide to locate your addresses.

• PostgreSQL database server:

  File: /etc/hosts

  1 2	127.0.1.1 postgresql.yourdomain.com postgresql 192.0.2.2 odoo.yourdomain.com odoo

  Note

  Use the public or private IP address of your Odoo application server on the second line of the above file snippet.

• Odoo 13 application server:

  File: /etc/hosts

  1 2	127.0.1.1 odoo.yourdomain.com odoo 192.0.2.3 postgresql.yourdomain.com postgresql

  Note

  Use the public or private IP address of your PostgreSQL database server on the second line of the above file snippet.

FQDNs are used throughout this guide whenever possible to avoid confusion.

Set Up the PostgreSQL Database

Configure Odoo’s postgresql database backend Linode. The Debian 10 official repository includes PostgreSQL version 11 which offers significant performance improvements as well as database replication compatibility.

Install the PostgreSQL database and developer libraries with the following command:

sudo apt install postgresql-11 postgresql-server-dev-11 -y

Create a PostgreSQL User

Odoo requires a separate PostgreSQL user for communications between the web application Linode and the database Linode. Create the database user odoo. This user is in charge of all operations. Use a strong password and save it in a secure location to use later:

sudo -u postgres createuser odoo -U postgres -dP

The options used are described below:

• -u: Executes the command as the postgres user.
• -U: Indicates the user name to connect as.
• -d: Grants the user permission to create databases.
• -P: Prompts you for the new user’s password.

Configure Host Based Authentication

1. Stop the PostgreSQL service:

    sudo systemctl stop postgresql
   

2. Edit the pg_hba.conf file to allow PostgreSQL Linode to communicate with the Odoo Linode server. Add the following line to the file:

   File: /etc/postgresql/11/main/pg_hba.conf

   1	host all odoo odoo.yourdomain.com md5

This line grants the odoo user the rights connect to all databases within this server.

The settings in the pg_hba.conf file are:

• host: Enables connections using Unix-domain sockets.
• all: Match all databases on the server. You can provide a comma separated list of specific Odoo database names if you know them beforehand.
• odoo: The Odoo user responsible for application/database communications.
• odoo.yourdomain.com: The address of your Odoo server. You should replace this with your FQDN or IP address.
• md5: Make use of client-supplied MD5-encrypted passwords for authentication.

Configure the PostgreSQL Listening Address

Edit postgresql.conf to allow the database server to listen to remote connections:

File: /etc/postgresql/11/main/postgresql.conf

1 2	#From CONNECTIONS AND AUTHENTICATION Section listen_addresses = '*'

The listen_addresses setting lists the IP addresses to listen on. The '*' wildcard means that the server listens to all IP addresses. You can limit this to only include the IP addresses that you consider safe.

Enable PostgreSQL on Startup

Now that you finished PostgreSQL configuration you can start the postgresql service and enable it on startup:

sudo systemctl start postgresql && sudo systemctl enable postgresql

Odoo 13 Setup

This section shows how to configure your Odoo 13 web application to work with the PostgreSQL database backend. Run the commands in this section on the Linode that you created for your Odoo application server.

Prepare Linode for Odoo 13 Installation

1. In order to separate Odoo from other services, create a new Odoo system user to run its processes:

    sudo adduser --system --home=/opt/odoo --group odoo
   

2. Install system dependencies that are needed during Odoo 13 set up:

    sudo apt install python3 python3-pip python3-suds python3-all-dev python3-venv \
    python3-dev python3-setuptools python3-tk libncurses5-dev libgdbm-dev libnss3-dev \
    libssl-dev libreadline-dev libffi-dev git libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libevent-dev \
    libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev pkg-config libtiff5-dev libjpeg62-turbo-dev libjpeg-dev \
    zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev liblcms2-utils libwebp-dev tcl8.6-dev \
    tk8.6-dev libyaml-dev fontconfig xfonts-75dpi xfonts-base xfonts-encodings xfonts-utils -y
   

3. Use Git to clone the Odoo files onto your server:

    sudo git clone https://www.github.com/odoo/odoo.git --depth 1 \
    --branch 13.0 --single-branch /opt/odoo
   

4. Enforce the use of POSIX locale to prevent possible errors during installation (this has nothing to do with the Odoo language):

    export LC_ALL=C
   

5. Install Less CSS via Node.js and npm:

    sudo curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash - \
    && sudo apt install -y nodejs \
    && sudo npm install -g less less-plugin-clean-css
   

6. Download wkhtmltopdf version 0.12.5 which is the recommended version for Odoo 13. For more information regarding wkhtmltopdf recommended versions, visit Odoo wiki

    cd /tmp
    wget https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/releases/download/0.12.5/wkhtmltox_0.12.5-1.buster_amd64.deb
   

7. Install the package:

    sudo dpkg -i wkhtmltox_0.12.5-1.buster_amd64.deb
   

8. To ensure that wkhtmltopdf functions properly, copy the binaries to a location in your executable path and give them the necessary permission for execution:

    sudo cp /usr/local/bin/wkhtmlto* /usr/bin/ \
    && sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/wk*
   

Set Up Virtualenv

It’s considered a best practice to isolate Odoo’s Python modules from the modules included as part of the operating system. This prevents unforeseen conflicts in the long run, especially after periodic OS updates. For that reason using virtualenv is highly recommended.

1. Create a new virtualenv environment for Odoo 13 application:

    python3 -m venv /home/<user>/odoo-env
   

2. Activate the odoo-env virtual environment you created in the previous step:

    source /home/<user>/odoo-env/bin/activate
   

3. Update pip3 using the following command:

    pip3 install --upgrade pip
   

4. Install Python’s wheel in the virtual environment:

    pip3 install wheel
   

Let’s review the virtual environment creation:

• python3 -m venv: Runs venv module using Python 3, this module is in charge of creating the virtual environment.
• /home/<user>/odoo-env: Indicates the path used for the virtual Python environment. For the purpose of this guide, home directory of the current user was used but you can change it to any location that suits your needs as long as you remember to grant the odoo user with proper permissions afterward.

Install Odoo’s Python modules

1. Install the dependencies required by Odoo in the Python 3 environment:

    pip3 install -r /opt/odoo/doc/requirements.txt
    pip3 install -r /opt/odoo/requirements.txt
   

2. Check that all requirements are properly installed in your virtual environment:

    pip3 list
   

3. Exit from the Python virtual environment by issuing the command:

    deactivate
   

Configure the Odoo Server

1. Copy the included configuration file to /etc/ and change its name to odoo-server.conf

    sudo cp /opt/odoo/debian/odoo.conf /etc/odoo-server.conf
   

2. Modify the configuration file. The complete file should look similar to the following, depending on your deployment needs:

   File: /etc/odoo-server.conf

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

   [options] admin_passwd = admin db_host = postgresql.yourdomain.com db_port = False db_user = odoo db_password = odoo_password addons_path = /opt/odoo/addons xmlrpc_port = 8069

• admin_passwd: The password that allows administrative operations within Odoo GUI. Be sure to change admin to something more secure.
• db_host: The postgresql FQDN.
• db_port: Odoo uses PostgreSQL’s default port 5432, change this only if you’re using custom PostgreSQL settings.
• db_user: Name of the PostgreSQL database user.
• db_password: Use the PostgreSQL odoo user password you created previously.
• addons_path: Default addons path. You can add custom paths separating them with commas: </path/to/custom/modules>
• xmlrpc_port: Port that Odoo listens on.

Create an Odoo Service

Create a systemd unit called odoo-server to allow your application to behave as a service. Create a new file at /lib/systemd/system/odoo-server.service and add the following, replace /home/<user> with the directory where you setup your virtual Python environment:

File: /lib/systemd/system/odoo-server.service

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

[Unit] Description=Odoo Open Source ERP and CRM [Service] Type=simple PermissionsStartOnly=true SyslogIdentifier=odoo-server User=odoo Group=odoo ExecStart=/home/<user>/odoo-env/bin/python3 /opt/odoo/odoo-bin --config=/etc/odoo-server.conf --addons-path=/opt/odoo/addons/ WorkingDirectory=/opt/odoo/ StandardOutput=journal+console [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

Change File Ownership and Permissions

1. Change the odoo-server service permissions and ownership so only root can write to it, while the odoo user can only read and execute on it:

   sudo chmod 755 /lib/systemd/system/odoo-server.service \
   && sudo chown root: /lib/systemd/system/odoo-server.service
   

2. Since the odoo user runs the application, change its ownership accordingly. Replace /home/<user> with the directory where you setup your virtual Python environment:

   sudo chown -R odoo: /opt/odoo/ && sudo chown -R odoo: /home/<user>/odoo-env
   

3. Protect the server configuration file. Change its ownership and permissions so no other non-root user can access it:

   sudo chown odoo: /etc/odoo-server.conf \
   && sudo chmod 640 /etc/odoo-server.conf
   

Test your Odoo Stack

Confirm that everything is working as expected:

1. Start the Odoo server:

   sudo systemctl start odoo-server
   

2. Confirm that odoo-server is running:

   sudo systemctl status odoo-server
   

3. In a browser, navigate to odoo.yourdomain.com:8069 or http://<your_Linode_IP_address>:8069. If your proxy and your DNS configuration are working properly you are presented with Odoo’s database creation screen:

   

4. Fill in all the fields, check the Demo data box to populate your database with sample data, and then click on Create database button.

   

5. In the browser, you should see a list of available apps, indicating that database creation was successful:

   The first time you create a database, Odoo may take several minutes to load all of its add-ons. Do not reload the page during this process.

Enable the Odoo Service

1. Enable the odoo-server service to start automatically on reboot:

   sudo systemctl enable odoo-server
   

2. Reboot your Linode from the Linode Manager.

3. Check the Odoo logs to verify that the Odoo server is running without errors:

   sudo journalctl -u odoo-server
   

Back Up Odoo Databases

If all components of your Odoo stack were running on a single server, you could immediately back up your databases using the Odoo database backup web interface. This interface is located at http://odoo.yourdomain.com:8069/web/database/manager.

However, this interface does not work by default with the configuration in this guide. This is because the interface needs the PostgreSQL software to be installed on the server. In this guide’s earlier instructions, PostgreSQL was not installed on the Linode running your Odoo application server.

You have two options to backup your production database:

1. Install PostgreSQL 11 on the Linode running your Odoo application server using the procedure described in this guide. This installs pg_dump and other utilities, allowing you to use the Odoo database backup web interface at http://odoo.yourdomain.com:8069/web/database/manager.

   You can later use this interface to restore your database from a specific database backup file. Odoo correctly restores to the database on the PostgreSQL server, and not to the database service that was installed on the Odoo application server. This happens because your Odoo configuration is explicit about the database connection.

2. You can use a procedure similar to the one described in our guide How to Back Up Your PostgreSQL Database from the backend PostgreSQL Linode.

Update Odoo Modules

These instructions show how to update your Odoo modules from the command line. However, from Odoo version 12 forward it is suggested that you update modules using Odoo’s web interface whatever possible.

From your Odoo application server, restart the Odoo service. Use the following flags to instruct the system to search for updates and apply any changes to modules:

sudo service odoo-server restart -u all -d <production_database_name>

Update the Odoo Application Server

These instructions show how to update your current version of Odoo. Specifically, they show how to update your Odoo application within the same version (e.g. Odoo 13), rather than upgrading to a newer Odoo version (e.g. from Odoo 12 to Odoo 13). Migrating from one version to another often requires several tests and manual modifications on the PostgreSQL database. These are dependent on the version of Odoo you are upgrading from.

1. From your Linode, download the new code from source:

   cd /opt/odoo \
   && sudo git fetch origin 13.0
   

2. Apply the changes to your repository:

   sudo git reset --hard origin/13.0
   

Next Steps

You now have Odoo 13 and PostgreSQL installed and configured. There are several enhancements that could be made to your installation to increase its usability and security:

Set Up a Web Server Reverse Proxy

You can install a web server as a reverse proxy in front of the Odoo application server. By doing so, your Odoo installation would be accessible on port 80 (HTTP) or port 443 (HTTPS), instead of port 8069.

Our Use NGINX as a Reverse Proxy guide lists further benefits of setting up a reverse proxy. It also shows how to use NGINX as a reverse proxy for an example Node.js application. The instructions in this guide could be adapted for your Odoo installation. In particular, you could alter the instructions in that guide’s Configure NGINX section to use port 8069, instead of port 3000.

If you proceed with setting up the reverse proxy, you should also add these lines to your /etc/odoo-server.conf Odoo server configuration file:

File: /etc/odoo-server.conf

1 2 3 4

; Append directly below the other lines in the file: proxy_mode = True xmlrpc_interface = 127.0.0.1 netrpc_interface = 127.0.0.1

These lines ensure the Odoo server that’s running on port 8069 only responds on localhost. As well, the proxy_mode directive makes the Odoo server compatible with your web server reverse proxy.

Then, restart the Odoo server:

sudo systemctl restart odoo-server

Finally, allow port 80 in your firewall. If you’re using UFW, these lines allow the port:

sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw reload

Set Up SSL

If you have set up a reverse proxy, you can also choose to serve your Odoo site over HTTPS. To do so, configure the reverse proxy server with an SSL certificate. The directions in our How to Install Certbot for TLS on Debian 10 guide show how to do this with NGINX on Debian 10.

After setting up an SSL certificate, be sure to allow port 443 in your firewall. If you’re using UFW, these lines allow the port:

sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
sudo ufw reload

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

• Odoo User Documentation
• Odoo Developer Documentation
• PostgreSQL 11 Documentation
• Install an SSL certificate with LetsEncrypt
• How to Set up tinc, a Peer-to-Peer VPN