
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Odoo 14 on an Ubuntu 20.04 VPS. Odoo is one of the most popular and most powerful open-source ERP business management software.

Written using the Python programming language, OpenERP (or Odoo as it is now called) is a modular ERP platform that adapts to your business’s needs, giving you the freedom to manage your business the way you want to.
The installation of Odoo 14 on an Ubuntu 20.04 VPS should take about ten minutes if you follow the very easy steps described below. Let’s begin.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
- Ubuntu 20.04 VPS with 2GB of memory or higher (we’ll be using our Managed Ubuntu SSD 2 VPS for this)
- Python 3
- PostgreSQL
- Apache 2 with
proxy
andproxy_http
modules enabled - SSH access with root privileges, or access to the root user. We give all of our users full root access on their VPSes.
Step 1 – Getting Started
Log in to your Ubuntu 20.04 VPS with SSH as the root user or as a sudo user by entering this command in your terminal session:
Make sure you replace IP_Address
and Port_number
with their respective values. The default SSH port is 22, but your server may have a different one.
You can check the Ubuntu version installed on your server with the following command:
You should get this output:
Once you are logged in, run the following command to update all installed OS packages to the latest available version:
Step 2 – Install the PostgreSQL Server
Odoo requires a PostgreSQL database to store its information, so we will have to install the PostgreSQL server to serve and accept database operations. In order to install PostgreSQL, we’ll run the following command:
Once installed, PostgreSQL server will be started and enabled to automatically start at server boot.
Step 3 – Install Odoo 14
We will install Odoo in a virtual environment. We have to install the following packages and dependencies required for the Odoo 14 installation. This includes Python and several extensions that are required for Odoo to work properly:
Next, we need to create a new system user for our Odoo 14 instance and a new PostgreSQL user with the same name. You can name your user however you like, but we will create a user named odoo14
and define /opt/odoo14
as its home directory:
Switch to the odoo14
user we have created in the previous step:
Clone the Odoo 14 source code from the Odoo GitHub repository:
Create a new python virtual environment as the user odoo14
:
Activate the virtual environment:
All Odoo dependencies are listed in the requirements.txt
file, located in the /opt/odoo14/odoo
directory. Additionally, we will need to install the wheel
package using pip
. To install all of these from within the virtual environment, run the following commands:
Once the installation is complete, we can exit the virtual environment and switch back to the sudo or root user using this command:
The following commands are optional and can be used if you want to use custom modules for the Odoo instance. The best practice is to install custom Odoo modules in a separate directory. Therefore we will create a new directory for the custom modules and change its ownership to the odoo14
user.
For debugging purposes, we will create a log file for the new Odoo 14 instance and change its ownership to the odoo14
user:
We have to create a configuration file for the Odoo 14 instance as well:
In the file that we just opened, add the following lines:
Do not forget to change the master_password
and use a strong password. You can generate a strong password through the command line. Save and close the Odoo 14 configuration file.
Create a systemd
unit file that we can use to run our Odoo 14 instance as a service.
Create a file named odoo14.service
and open it using your favorite text editor:
Add the following lines:
Run the following command for systemd
to read the newly created service configuration:
Start the Odoo 14 service:
Enable the Odoo 14 instance to start automatically on a server boot:
To check and verify the status of our Odoo 14 service, run the following command:
You should receive the following output:
If you want to install another Odoo instance, you can repeat all of the steps from this section. Do not forget to use a different name for the second Odoo user, third Odoo user, and so on. You can name the user however you want, just do not forget to create a PostgreSQL user with the same name.
Step 4 – Setting up Apache as a Reverse Proxy
If you only need to access Odoo using an IP address, then you are finished with installing Odoo 14 on Ubuntu 20.04. You can access it in your web browser by using your IP address at the default port, 8069.
However, if you have a valid domain name and you would like to use it in order to access your Odoo 14 instance instead of typing the IP address and the port number in the URL, you will have to set up a reverse proxy. We’ll be using Apache to accomplish that task in this tutorial.
Apache is considered as the most widely-used and user-friendly web server software. It is fast, secure, reliable, and can be easily customized depending on your needs.
To install Apache on the server, run the following command:
Once the installation is complete, enable Apache to start automatically upon system boot using the following command:
To verify that Apache is running, open your web browser and enter your server’s IP address (e.g. http://111.222.333.444
). If Apache is successfully installed, you should see a message saying “It works!”.
Enable the proxy
and proxy_http
modules in Apache using the following commands:
Create a new Apache configuration file for your domain:
Name the above file using your registered domain name. Then open the file and add the following lines:
Do not forget to replace all occurrences of yourdomain.com
with your actual registered domain name.
Enable the newly created Apache configuration:
Finally, restart Apache for the changes to take effect:
Now you should be able to access the Odoo 14 instance with your domain name at http://yourdomain.com
. Open http://yourdomain.com
using your favorite web browser and you will be automatically redirected to http://yourdomain.com/web/database/manager
. From there, you can complete the Odoo installation by using their setup wizard.
Create a new Odoo database:
Log in to the Odoo back-end. You can now add new modules, new users, modify the settings, etc.
That’s all there is to it! You now have a successful install of Odoo 14 on your Ubuntu 20.04 VPS while also using Apache as a reverse proxy. You can also set up additional instances of Odoo easily.
Managing your business can take a lot of your time and effort away from keeping your back-end systems maintained properly. Our expert admins are able to completely maintain and optimize your Odoo experience if you use our Managed Odoo hosting services. The lifetime support is included in the price and covers anything from maintenance to requests of any kind, including installation and configuration of software.
We would greatly appreciate you sharing this post on social media by using our share shortcuts if we helped you install Odoo 14 on your Ubuntu 20.04 VPS. You can also leave a comment in our comment section if you have any suggestions or questions about this guide. Thank you.