Using buildout for repeatable builds

So far, we have been manually setting up our instances. This cries for automation, and maybe you have already written a shell script to download the proper version of the addons your instance needs and streamlined the process. It turns out that there is a tool meant to help with doing this called buildout. Buildout is a Python-based build system for creating, assembling, and deploying applications from multiple parts, some of which may be non-Python-based. It lets you create a buildout configuration and reproduce the same software later.

This recipe shows how you can start using buildout to ensure you have the same setup in the development and production servers.

At the time of writing this, the buildout recipe has not been adapted to work with Odoo 11.0 and Python3. This section is based on what is likely to be the correct way to use this tool, but you may encounter slight differences. Be sure to check the documentation.