Starting the instance

Now comes the moment you've been waiting for. To start our first instance, we first create a new empty database and then use the odoo-bin script with the following command-line arguments:

• -d database_name: Use that database by default.
• --db-filter=database_name$: Only try to connect to databases matching the supplied regular expression. One Odoo installation can serve multiple instances living in separate databases, and this argument limits the available databases. The trailing $ is important as the regular expression is used in match mode; this avoids selecting names starting with the specified string.
• --addons-path=directory1,directory2,...: This is a comma separated list of directories in which Odoo will look for addons. This list is scanned at the instance creation time to populate the list of available addon modules in the instance.

If you are using a database user with a database login different from your Linux login, you need to pass the following additional arguments:

• --db_host=localhost: Use a TCP connection to the database server
• --db_user=database_username: Use the specified database login
• --db_password=database_password: The password to use to authenticate against the PostgreSQL server

To get an overview of all of the available options, use the --help argument. We will see much more about the odoo-bin script in this chapter as well as in Chapter 2, Managing Odoo Server Instances.

When Odoo is started on an empty database, it will first create the database structure needed to support its operations. It will also scan the addons path to find the available addon modules, and insert some into the initial records in the database. This includes the admin user with the default password admin, which you will use to authenticate with.

Odoo includes an HTTP server. By default, it listens on all local network interfaces on TCP port 8069, so pointing your web browser to http://localhost:8069/ leads you to your newly created instance.