Install Odoo 11 on CentOS 7

Odoo is the most popular all-in-one business software in the world. It offers a range of business applications including CRM, website, e-Commerce, billing, accounting, manufacturing, warehouse, project management, inventory and much more, all seamlessly integrated.

Odoo 11 requires Python 3.5 which is not available in the CentOS repositories. Because of that, we cannot install the Odoo package via yum from the Odoo repository.

We either run Odoo in a docker container or install it in a Python virtual environment.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to install Odoo 11 using Git source and Python virtual environment on a CentOS 7 machine.

Before you begin #

Log in to you CentOS machine as a sudo user and update the system to the latest packages:

sudo yum update

Enable the EPEL repository by typing:

sudo yum install epel-release

We will install Python 3.5 packages from the Software Collections (SCL) repository.

By enabling SCL you will gain access to the newer versions of programming languages and services which are not available in the core repositories. Enable the SCL repository with the following command:

sudo yum install centos-release-scl

Install Python 3.5 packages, with the following command:

sudo yum install rh-python35

Finally install git, pip and all the tools required to build Odoo dependencies:

sudo yum install git gcc wget nodejs-less libxslt-devel bzip2-devel openldap-devel libjpeg-devel freetype-devel postgresql-devel

Create Odoo user #

Create a new system user and group with home directory /opt/odoo that will run the Odoo service:

sudo useradd -m -U -r -d /opt/odoo -s /bin/bash odoo

Install and configure PostgreSQL #

Install the PostgreSQL server and create a new PostgreSQL database cluster:

sudo yum install postgresql-server
sudo postgresql-setup initdb

Once the installation is completed, enable and start the PostgreSQL service:

sudo systemctl enable postgresql
sudo systemctl start postgresql

Create a PostgreSQL user with the same name as the previously created system user, in our case odoo:

sudo su - postgres -c "createuser -s odoo"

Install Wkhtmltopdf #

The wkhtmltox package provides a set of open-source command line tools which can render HTML into PDF and various image formats. In order to print PDF reports, you will need the wkhtmltopdf tool. The recommended version for Odoo is 0.12.1 which is not available in the official CentOS 7 repositories.

To download and install the recommended version run the following commands:

wget https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/releases/download/0.12.1/wkhtmltox-0.12.1_linux-centos7-amd64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall wkhtmltox-0.12.1_linux-centos7-amd64.rpm

Install and configure Odoo 11 #

We will install Odoo from the GitHub repository so we can have more control over versions and updates. We will also use virtualenv which is a tool to create isolated Python environments.

Before starting with the installation process, make sure you [switch to the user] “odoo”:

sudo su - odoo

To confirm that you are logged-in as odoo user you can use the following command:

whoami

Now we can start with the installation process, first clone the odoo from the GitHub repository:

git clone https://www.github.com/odoo/odoo --depth 1 --branch 11.0 /opt/odoo/odoo11

Enable software collections so we can access the python 3.5 binaries:

scl enable rh-python35 bash

Create a new virtual environment for our Odoo installation with:

cd /opt/odoo
python3 -m venv odoo11-venv

activate the environment:

source odoo11-venv/bin/activate

and install all required Python modules:

pip3 install -r odoo11/requirements.txt

Once the installation is completed deactivate the environment and switch back to your sudo user using the following commands:

deactivate

exit

If you plan to install custom modules it is best to install those modules in a separate directory. To create a new directory for the custom modules run:

sudo mkdir /opt/odoo/odoo11-custom-addons
sudo chown odoo: /opt/odoo/odoo11-custom-addons

Next, we need to create a configuration file:

[options]
; This is the password that allows database operations:
admin_passwd = superadmin_passwd
db_host = False
db_port = False
db_user = odoo
db_password = False
addons_path = /opt/odoo/odoo11/addons
; If you are using custom modules
; addons_path = /opt/odoo/odoo11/addons,/opt/odoo/odoo11-custom-addons

Create a systemd unit file #

To run odoo as a service we will create a odoo11.service unit file in the /etc/systemd/system/ directory with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=Odoo11
Requires=postgresql.service
After=network.target postgresql.service

[Service]
Type=simple
SyslogIdentifier=odoo11
PermissionsStartOnly=true
User=odoo
Group=odoo
ExecStart=/usr/bin/scl enable rh-python35 -- /opt/odoo/odoo11-venv/bin/python3 /opt/odoo/odoo11/odoo-bin -c /etc/odoo11.conf
StandardOutput=journal+console

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Notify systemd that we have created a new unit file and start the Odoo service by executing:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start odoo11

You can check the service status with the following command:

sudo systemctl status odoo11

● odoo11.service - Odoo11
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/odoo11.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Wed 2018-03-28 20:13:30 UTC; 6s ago
 Main PID: 16174 (scl)
   CGroup: /system.slice/odoo11.service
           ├─16174 /usr/bin/scl enable rh-python35 -- /opt/odoo/odoo11-venv/bin/python3 /opt/odoo/odoo11/odoo-bin -c /etc/odoo11.conf
           ├─16175 /bin/bash /var/tmp/sclihoNjg
           └─16178 /opt/odoo/odoo11-venv/bin/python3 /opt/odoo/odoo11/odoo-bin -c /etc/odoo11.conf

and if there are no errors you can enable the Odoo service to be automatically started at boot time:

sudo systemctl enable odoo11

If you want to see the messages logged by the Odoo service, you can use journalctl :

sudo journalctl -u odoo11

Test the Installation #

Open your browser and type: http://<your_domain_or_IP_address>:8069

Assuming the installation is successful, a screen similar to the following will appear:

Conclusion #

This tutorial walked you through the installation of Odoo 11 on CentOS 7 in a Python virtual environment.

You may also want to check our tutorial about how to create automatic daily backups of your Odoo databases .

If you hit a problem or have feedback, leave a comment below.

About the authors

Dejan Panovski

Dejan Panovski is the founder of Linuxize, an RHCSA-certified Linux system administrator and DevOps engineer based in Skopje, Macedonia. Author of 800+ Linux tutorials with 20+ years of experience turning complex Linux tasks into clear, reliable guides.

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