Automatic detection of python dependencies

[Nitrogly]

Hello everyone 👋

First of all: wow. You, Tecnativa, and all contributors are amazing with what you've built here! 🎉

I'm new to Odoo and came across your repo – it's absolutely fantastic and I feel very comfortable working with it.

My Question

Perhaps I've missed this in the FAQ or documentation, but it's about automatically detecting Python modules from Odoo addons.

Are the required Python modules automatically detected and I don't need to do anything, or do they need to be manually added to pip.txt?

Example

For example, the OCA repository account-financial-tools has the following Python requirements:

freezegun
numpy-financial<=1.0.0
numpy>=1.15
python-dateutil

What I've Found

I've already seen something similar in this repo that automatically generates a requirements.txt:
https://github.com/OCA/oca-addons-repo-template

Questions

• Does Doodba have something similar, or do I need to manually add every dependency from OCA addons to pip.txt?
• Or should I use oca-addons-repo-template on top of it?

Do you have any tips for me?

Thanks in advance! 🙏

[pedrobaeza]

As it's designed, Doodba requires to explicitly put the Python dependencies into pip.txt. This is because you may not want to use all the modules of the repository, and the file requirements.txt contains more dependencies than needed. It's also because most modules don't require extra Python libraries, so it's something unfrequent. Anyway, you can link the requirements.txt files of each repo in pip.txt for not having to copy/paste them if you prefer that way.

[Nitrogly]

Hi @pedrobaeza, thank you for the quick and detailed explanation of how and why Doodba works the way it does 😁.
The tip you mentioned about adding links to the pip.txt file is a really good idea, it honestly never occurred to me!
I will use it in my project.

I’m definitely not as deep into the topic as you are (😅), but I just want to understand and learn :)
Doesn’t the oca-addons-repo-template also inspect the manifest file to determine which Python modules are required?
Wouldn’t that make it possible to avoid having to include all dependencies from requirements.txt and instead only include the packages that are actually required by the manifest?
Or was this approach chosen intentionally for doodba so that everything stays more maintainable and controllable? I’m interested about the idea behind it.

And there’s another idea I’ve been wondering about:
What do you think of the approach of referencing the OCA Python packages directly in pip.txt? Since pip install automatically pulls in all dependencies, this could simplify things quite a bit. For production, you could then lock the exact versions of the Python packages that were installed. Are there any drawbacks to this approach (aside from the fact that you might end up using unreleased versions)?

Thank you in advance, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

[pedrobaeza]

An Odoo module is not a Python package, and the efforts for making them inside the OCA ecosystem are laudable, with some juicy advantages like automatic resolution of Python and other module dependencies, but for us, they come with a high cost: to twist and to bend things to match the Odoo module into this other thing. This provokes a less understandable ecosystem when a problem arises, to depend on more outsiders pieces of infrastructure (the Python package providers), to complicate devel environment, etc.

And not only that, when wanting to use other external resources outside OCA, you won't have that facilities, and you may need another method for the rest.

About putting on the requirements.txt the OCA Python Package addon name, we haven't tested, but I would say the addon won't be available on the module list, but you can try...

[Nitrogly]

Hi @pedrobaeza,

thank you so much for your detailed explanation! I completely understand your reasoning and the design decisions behind Doodba – especially the points about maintainability, control, and consistency across different addon sources make absolute sense. 👍

I just wanted to share an additional perspective from what I've observed in practice:

As far as I understand and have tested myself, Odoo searches the Python library for addons automatic. This means you can install OCA addons directly via pip. The OCA even posted an example about this a few years ago:
How to install OCA modules and here (older one) Installing OCA addons, the easy way!.
Note that odoo-autodiscover not needed since Odoo 11.

I've also found this approach in other Odoo + Docker projects here on GitHub. I created one myself that downloads the packages during Docker container creation instead of using git-aggregator. These modules are then directly available in Odoo under modules (as mentioned above).

In practice:

1. First install Odoo's requirements.txt
2. Then add your own modules on top
3. Pip merges these automatically

To ensure the versions match the Odoo version, I simply constrained the version range like this (e.g., for Odoo 18) in a separate requirements.txt (or pip.txt):

odoo-addon-web-responsive>=18.0,<19.0

But as you already mentioned, the control is missing with this approach. Nevertheless, it's a nice-to-have for quickly installing modules for fast tests that I want mentioned.
Thank you!