The OC Guy

Odoo Community A 1689 engraved world map in two hemispheres, ringed by allegorical figures and ships tips and tricks.

Hey — welcome. Here you find the best tips and tricks for Odoo Community, the open-source ERP small companies run themselves: install it, back it up, extend it, and bolt AI on top. I am The OC Guy, Oliver Arnold.

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What Odoo Community is

A full ERP whose licence costs nothing: An engraving of four kinds of globe, opened to show their rings and axes read every line, change it, run it on your own server An engraved seventeenth-century printer's workshop: a hand press, workmen setting type and it answers to you.

A 1794 wall map of the world in two hemispheres, engraved with notes on voyages and discoveries
A 1794 double-hemisphere map: knowledge printed once, copied by hand, corrected by everyone who used it.

Written in the open, used in the open

Odoo Community is published under LGPL v3. No seat count, no trial that expires, no module you must rent back. The people who make it stronger are the people who run it: localisation packs for your country's taxes, modules for your industry, a patch for the bug you hit last week. That is the deal — you inherit a working ERP, and you owe the next person what you learned.

The 1689 world map again, closer: the engraved landmasses and sea routes of two hemispheres

What you get with Odoo Community

Zero per user, per month. Odoo Community is LGPL v3: you pay for a server and your own time, not for permission.

PostgreSQL on your own machine. One pg_dump is the whole company, portable to any host you like.

The source is public. Find the field, change the field, keep the change — no vendor to convince, no feature request to queue.

The OCA repositories and the Odoo app store carry thousands of modules, most of them free, written by people solving their own problem first.

The ERP keeps the truth — stock, invoices, orders. The model reads it and drafts with it. Boring, correct data in; useful answers out.

Tips that save a weekend

Seven things worth knowing before your first install, and before every upgrade after it.

What does your company actually do?

Choose one, or several. The modules stack in the order you would install them.

An engraving of four kinds of globe on stands, opened to show their rings and axes
  1. Install Run it from Docker Compose, not from source. One file, two containers
  2. Backup Dump the database nightly and actually restore it monthly. pg_dump, then psql
  3. Upgrade Stay on one major series, and migrate a copy before the live one. Never in place
  4. Extend Take an OCA module before you write your own. github.com/OCA
  5. Extend Keep your code in one addons path and never edit core files. Inherit, do not patch
  6. Debug Answer "where does this field live" with the Odoo shell, not with grep. odoo shell
  7. Invoice Load the localisation pack for your country before the first invoice. l10n_<your country>

Who is typing

An engraved printer's workshop: a hand press on the left, workmen setting type in the centre I am Oliver. I run Odoo Community for my own company and write down what breaks. No partner, no licences: own your ERP, bolt AI on.

Oliver Arnold, 安雷威 o.arnold@projektbox.de

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