Installing Odoo 8 on CentOS 7 with virtual Python install

This tutorial will walk you through the process of installing the latest version of Odoo on CentOS 7. It is intended for those who might not be experienced Linux administrators but who want to run their own Odoo server. You can simply copy-paste the commands into your terminal or SSH window.

Please note this tutorial is only for CentOS 7. For CentOS 6.x please see my other tutorial.

First we will install the PostgreSQL database server, then install the necessary package dependencies. Next we will create a virtual Python environment (so we don’t interfere with the CentOS version) and install all the modules Odoo requires. Then it’s time to pull the latest Odoo code from GitHub and create a CentOS 7 compatible init script. Finally we will add the necessary firewall rules and connect to the server.

This tutorial assumes you have already performed a minimal install of the latest version of CentOS 7 on a server dedicated to just running Odoo. It also assumes you will be running Odoo on the same server as the PostgreSQL database. You also need at least 1GB of RAM, although this can include SWAP space.

Odoo is a complicated installation with many dependencies and can be quite resource intensive. I highly recommend you install on a server (or real or virtual) that is dedicated to Odoo. Co-locating Odoo with existing websites/applications is likely to cause problems at some point.

Make sure you enter these commands as the root user, and make sure you change any sections highlighted in red – they will be specific to your environment.

1: Generate Odoo Passwords

Before starting installation we will generate two passwords. The first line generates a strong random password for the odoo server to access the PostgreSQL database that we will install. The second line is the master password you will use to create the Odoo database after the installation is complete. Don’t worry about these for now. After the installation is complete you will find both these passwords in the Odoo configuration file (/etc/odoo-server.conf).

ODOO_POSTGRES_PASSWORD=`< /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c${1:-20};echo;`
ODOO_DB_ADMIN_PASSWORD=`< /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c${1:-20};echo;`

2: Install and configure PostgreSQL

First will install the PostgreSQL version from the official CentOS respository. This makes it easier to keep up to date with important security and maintenance updated. Then we initialise the database and add PostgreSQL to the list of applications which will be enabled when the server is restarted.

yum -y install postgresql-server postgresql-devel
postgresql-setup initdb
systemctl enable postgresql.service

Next we need to configure PostgreSQL so it will accept connections using MD5 hashed passwords for extra security.

cp /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf.orig
sed -i "/^host/s/ident/md5/g" /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf

Finally let’s start the PostgreSQL server and add the Odoo user with the password we generated in step 1.

systemctl start postgresql.service
echo -e "$ODOO_POSTGRES_PASSWORD\n$ODOO_POSTGRES_PASSWORD\n" | su - postgres -c "createuser --createdb --username postgres --no-createrole --no-superuser --pwprompt odoo"

3: Installing Python libraries in a virtual environment

Odoo requires a lot of Python libraries. Potentially these could conflict with the Python libraries supplied in CentOS 7 and relied upon by the built in administration tools. So to avoid this risk we will create a virtual environment under the odoo system user account which will be used solely by the Odoo server.

First lets install some packages we will need before we can install the Python modules.

yum -y install wget gcc zlib-devel bzip2-devel openssl-devel ncurses-devel sqlite-devel readline-devel tk-devel gdbm-devel db4-devel libffi-devel libxslt libxslt-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel openldap-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel openjpeg-devel libtiff-devel libyaml-devel python-virtualenv git libpng12 libXext xorg-x11-fonts-Type1

We also need the wkhtmltopdf package in order to generate PDF reports in Odoo. This link is for the 64bit version of CentOS. For 32bit change ‘amd64’ to ‘i386’ in the filename below. Also note that on CentOS 7 you must install the “libpng12” package (included above) otherwise it won’t run.

rpm -ivh http://sourceforge.net/projects/wkhtmltopdf/files/0.12.2/wkhtmltox-0.12.2_linux-centos7-amd64.rpm/download
ln -s /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf /usr/bin/

Optional: You may wish to install Microsoft’s Core Fonts so they are available when you generate reports in Odoo. First we need to install some dependencies, then the msttcore-fonts-installer rpm downloads the fonts from sourceforge, installs them and activates them on your CentOS server.

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/l/libmspack-0.4-0.2.alpha.el7.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/c/cabextract-1.4-4.el7.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/mscorefonts2/rpms/msttcore-fonts-installer-2.6-1.noarch.rpm

Next let’s create an Odoo user and setup the virtual environment.

adduser odoo

DIR="/var/run/odoo /var/log/odoo /opt/odoo"
for NAME in $DIR
do
if [ ! -d $NAME ]; then
 mkdir $NAME
 chown odoo.odoo $NAME
fi
done

su - odoo

/bin/virtualenv odoo
source odoo/bin/activate

Now let’s install all the Python modules.Note we are replacing PIL with pillow – it’s a better supporting fork of PIL and it plays nicely with the location of the CentOS development libraries.

pip install http://download.gna.org/pychart/PyChart-1.39.tar.gz
pip install babel
pip install docutils
pip install feedparser
pip install gdata
pip install Jinja2
pip install mako
pip install mock
pip install psutil
pip install psycopg2
pip install pydot
pip install python-dateutil
pip install python-openid
pip install pytz
pip install pywebdav
pip install pyyaml
pip install reportlab
pip install simplejson
pip install unittest2
pip install vatnumber
pip install vobject
pip install werkzeug
pip install xlwt
pip install pyopenssl
pip install lxml
pip install python-ldap
pip install pillow
pip install decorator
pip install requests
pip install pyPdf
pip install wkhtmltopdf
pip install passlib

4: Installing Odoo 8 from GitHub

Now it’s finally time to install Odoo itself. We are going to download the latest version of Odoo 8 from the GitHub repository. Note that we are installing into the /opt directory so we can easily manage the installation in a single location and keep it separate from the rest of the operating system.

cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/odoo/odoo.git --branch 8.0
chown -R odoo.odoo odoo
exit

Once Odoo has been downloaded we need to apply some configuration settings. These will get you up and running, although you might want to edit them in the future to be more relevant to your specific requirements.

cat > /etc/odoo-server.conf << EOF
[options]
; This is the password that allows database operations:
admin_passwd = $ODOO_DB_ADMIN_PASSWORD
; DATABASE OPTIONS
db_host = localhost
db_port = 5432
db_user = odoo
db_password = $ODOO_POSTGRES_PASSWORD
; MISC SETTINGS
addons_path = /opt/odoo/addons
without-demo=all
no-xmlrpc = True
no-xmlrpcs = True
no-netrpc = True
; LOG SETTINGS
logfile = /var/log/odoo/odoo-server.log
log_handler = werkzeug:WARNING
log_level = warn
no-logrotate = True

EOF

I also like to enable logrotation using the built in CentOS tools so the logs are managed in the same way as all the other applications.

cat > /etc/logrotate.d/odoo-server << EOF
/var/log/odoo/*.log {
    copytruncate
    missingok
    notifempty
}
EOF

Next we create a script to easily start and stop the Odoo server. Note that in CentOS 7 the format of the init scripts was completely changed so the old ones won’t work. The init script provided below also plays nicely with the virtual Python environment we created earlier.

cat > /usr/lib/systemd/system/odoo.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=Odoo Open Source ERP and CRM
After=network.target postgresql.service

[Service]
Type=forking
User=odoo
Group=odoo
Environment="ENVDIR=/home/odoo/odoo"
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c "cd /home/odoo; /bin/virtualenv -q odoo; source odoo/bin/activate; /usr/bin/odoo-server --config=/etc/odoo-server.conf &"


[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

EOF


ln -s /opt/odoo/openerp-server /usr/bin/odoo-server
systemctl enable odoo

The final step in this section is to add the necessary firewall rules and start the OpenERP server. I’ve assumed the server is using the default eth0 interface for external connectivity and it’s in the public zone.

firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=8069/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

systemctl start odoo

You should be able to open a browser and connect to OpenERP: http://odoo.yourdomain.com:8069

You can check the logfiles in /var/log/messages and /var/log/odoo/odoo-server.log to make sure everything started correctly. Note you can also use “systemctl restart odoo” and “systemctl stop odoo” to restart and stop Odoo as required.

tail -50f /var/log/odoo/odoo-server.log

5: Updating Odoo

If you want to update the Odoo code to the latest version you can easily do that by stopping the server then performing a “git pull”. Note that you must only do the git pull as the odoo user.

systemctl stop odoo
su - odoo
cd /opt/odoo
git pull
exit
systemctl start odoo

I hope this guide helps you get Odoo 8 up and running on CentOS 7. Let me know how you get on in the comment section, and also check out my other tutorials.