How to run OpenERP 6.1 Web on a different machine

Question

How do I run OpenERP Web 6.1 on a different machine than OpenERP server?

In 6.0 this was easy, there were 2 config files and 2 servers (server and "web client") and they communicated over TCP/IP.

I am not sure how to setup something similar for 6.1.

I was not able to find helpful documentation on this subject. Do they still communicate over TCP/IP? How do I configure the "web client" to use a different server machine? I would like to understand the new concept here.

Answer 1

tl;dr answer

It's meant only for debugging, but you can. Use the openerp-web startup script that is included in the openerp-web project, which you can install from the source. There's no separate installer for it, as it's not meant for production. You can pass parameters to set the remote OpenERP server to connect to, e.g. --server-host, --server-port, etc. Use --help to see the options.

Long answer

OpenERP 6.1 comes with a series of architectural changes that allow:

• running many OpenERP server processes in parallel, thanks to improved statelessness. This makes distributed deployment a breeze, and gives load-balancing/fail-over/high-availability capabilities. It also allows OpenERP to benefit from multi-processor/multi-core hardware.
• deploying the web interface as a regular OpenERP module, relieving you from having to deploy and maintain two separate server processes. When it runs embedded the web client can also make direct Python calls to the server API, avoiding unnecessary RPC marshalling, for an extra performance boost.

This change is explained in greater details in this presentation, along with all the technical reasons behind it.

A standalone mode is still available for the web client with the openerp-web script provided in the openerp-web project, but it is meant for debugging purposes rather than production. It runs in mono-thread mode by default (see the --multi-thread startup parameter), in order to serialize all RPC calls and make debugging easier. In addition to being slower, this mode will also break all modules that have a web part, unless all regular OpenERP addons are also copied in the --addons-path of the web process. And even then, some will be broken because they may still partially depend on the embedded mode.

Now if you were simply looking for a distributed deployment model, stop looking: just run multiple OpenERP (server) processes with the full stack. Have a look at the presentation mentioned above to get started with Gunicorn, WSGI, etc.

Note: Due to these severe limitations and its relative uselessness (vs maintenance cost), the standalone mode for the web client has been completely removed (see rev, 3200 on launchpad) in OpenERP 7.0.