There's more…

The way we set up the Docker image in this recipe is merely a starting point. You will probably want to tune a lot of parameters, add options to the entry point to ease the management of the instance, modify the composition file to allow running Odoo from mounts of your local checkouts of the sources rather than requiring a rebuild each time you edit a module... all of which is far beyond the scope of this book.

Odoo proposes Docker images on Docker Hub (https://hub.docker.com/_/odoo/). In the same way, we do not advise using the Debian packages of Odoo or the nightly builds provided by Odoo, and we do not advise using the Docker images for production, as they make it impractical to test patches sent by Odoo. However, to set up test instances or demo instances, the approach can certainly be considered.

Docker is a huge universe, and offers a wealth of options. You may want to publish your images on a Docker image repository, and use Docker push and Docker pull to publish and retrieve the Docker images of your projects. You may want to run a container management platform such as Rancher to run your images on a cluster of servers with load balancing. Alternatively, you can integrate the image building step with your continuous integration environment to publish snapshots of your developments for testing.