Odoo on Cubeship

Odoo is an open-source suite of business apps: CRM, sales, invoicing and accounting, inventory, projects, a website builder and more, all sharing one database.

This template installs Odoo Community on a Cubeship instance, with the managed Postgres it keeps everything in and a volume for the files it stores beside it.

What it creates

• odoo — Odoo Community 19.0, built on the instance from the Dockerfile in this repository on top of odoo:19.0-20260908. It answers on the domain you choose and keeps attachments and sessions in a volume at /var/lib/odoo.
• odoo-db — a managed Postgres 17, with a login called odoo and a database called odoo.

It needs Cubeship 0.7.0 or newer, and an admin to install it: the app is built on the instance, and only admins build.

Why it is built

The published image, odoo, starts with no database. On a first visit it opens its database manager, a public page where whoever arrives first creates one. A database made there would also not be the one Cubeship backs up: Cubeship dumps the database it created, odoo, and Odoo would make another.

So the Dockerfile here is that image with two additions:

• odoo.conf: proxy mode on, the threaded server, and the database manager off.
• cubeship-entrypoint.sh, which runs before the image's own entrypoint. At every start it writes the master password into odoo.conf — Odoo reads it from that file and nowhere else. On the first start, while the odoo database is still empty, it creates it with odoo db init: your language and country, your login and password, and no demo data. It never replaces a database that has tables in it.

What you are asked

Input	What to give
Where Odoo answers	A domain you control, pointed at your instance.
The email you sign in with	Your login as Odoo's administrator. It also becomes the company's email address.
The password you sign in with	Nothing — the instance generates it and shows it once. It is used when the database is created, and never again: change it in Odoo afterwards, not in the app's settings.
Odoo's master password	Nothing — generated and shown once. It guards creating, copying, dumping and deleting databases. With the database manager off nothing asks for it, but keep it for the day you turn the manager on.
The language the database is created in	An Odoo language code: en_US, fr_FR, pt_BR, es_419… More languages can be installed later.
The company's country	Optional. A two-letter code, like US or BR. It sets the company's currency, and everyone's timezone when the country has only one. Leave it empty to set it later.

A language or country Odoo does not know makes the first start fail: the database is dropped again and the app keeps restarting. Correct the variable in the app's settings and deploy.

After installing

1. Wait a few minutes. The first start creates the database and installs Odoo's base modules, and the domain answers 503 until that is done. The app's logs say Creating Odoo database odoo when it starts, and Odoo's own log follows.
2. Open the domain and sign in with the email and generated password.
3. Change the password under your avatar → My Preferences → Security.
4. Open Apps and install what you need. Set the company's country under Settings → Companies before installing Invoicing or Accounting: the chart of accounts and taxes are picked from it.
5. Set up an outgoing mail server in Settings. Odoo sends no email until you do.

Cubeship has no console into an app. Anything that needs a shell is done over SSH on the machine the app runs on, with docker exec. To reset the administrator's password, for instance:

docker exec -it $(docker ps -qf name=cubeship-odoo-production-odoo) \
  odoo shell --no-http

env['res.users'].browse(2).password = 'a new password'
env.cr.commit()

The container name follows the project, environment and app names you install with. browse(2) is the administrator the database was created with.

Choices this template makes

• The threaded server, not workers. Odoo's live features — chat, notifications, a record updating while another person edits it — go over a websocket at /websocket. With workers set, Odoo serves that on a second port, 8072, and expects a proxy to send /websocket there. A Cubeship domain reaches one port. The threaded server (workers = 0) serves the websocket on 8069 with everything else, so it all works on one domain.

  The cost is the one Odoo's deployment guide describes: one Python process, so heavy requests share one CPU core, and no per-worker memory or time limits recycling a runaway request. It suits a company of a few dozen people. Beyond that, Odoo's multi-process server wants a proxy that Cubeship cannot configure for one app.

• No database manager. list_db = False turns off the page at /web/database/manager and the database calls of the XML-RPC API, as Odoo's guide advises once an instance serves one database. The database is named by PGDATABASE, and Odoo serves only that one.

• Proxy mode on. TLS ends at Cubeship's proxy, and Odoo needs proxy_mode = True to believe the X-Forwarded-* headers — otherwise its links are http:// and every login is logged from the proxy's address.

• No demo data. To try Odoo with sample records, install a separate copy; demo data cannot be removed from a database once loaded.

• The database login is a superuser. Cubeship's managed Postgres gives its one login every privilege, and Odoo's guide says its login should not be a superuser. Odoo only refuses the name postgres, so it runs. The Postgres server is Odoo's alone.

Backups

Odoo keeps every record in the database, and the files attached to them — attachments, images, the compiled web assets — in the volume, under /var/lib/odoo/filestore/odoo. A backup needs both, taken close together: a database restored without its filestore shows broken images and missing attachments.

• Back the database up from odoo-db's page in the dashboard.
• Back the volume up from the app's settings.

Restore both, then deploy the app.

The volume

The app runs as one copy on the machine its volume is on, and a deploy stops it for a few seconds: sessions survive, open pages reconnect. Custom modules are not in the volume — /mnt/extra-addons is empty and disappears with each container. To add modules, fork this repository and COPY them into /mnt/extra-addons in the Dockerfile.

Updating

Odoo publishes a dated image for every nightly build of 19.0. Change the tag in the Dockerfile, release this repository — or your fork — and point the app's ref at the new release. Back up the database and the volume first. After a deploy, update the installed modules if the release notes ask for it:

docker exec -it $(docker ps -qf name=cubeship-odoo-production-odoo) \
  odoo -u all --stop-after-init --no-http

Moving to a new major version (20.0) is a migration, not a tag change: Odoo Community has no upgrade path of its own; OpenUpgrade is the community's.

Resources

The app is limited to 2 CPUs and 2 GiB of memory; the threaded server uses one core for Python work at a time. Raise limits in template.yaml for many users or large imports.