Odoo - How To Manage & Update Static Files

Question

Static Files in Odoo

I'm new to Odoo, and am working through developing a custom theme for a client. I've worked through the theme tutorial despite the many errors and omissions that exist in that documentation (going to make a pull request to update that after I'm done). My latest struggle is dealing with static files in Odoo, specifically images in the theme.

The Setup

Running Odoo 13.0.20200323 on Ubuntu 18.04 in VirtualBox managed by Vagrant and provisioned with Ansible

The Problem

Changes to image files in the static folder are not reflected on the website. This includes updating the theme in the website theme settings (the update function seems to update everything else). I've changed image names, image content, moved them into other folder, and have not been able to figure out how to have any changes updated on the website. I've restarted the server, doesn't change anything. Updated the theme as stated above, doesn't work. The only way I've been able to have any changes reflected on the front end is to completely destroy and rebuild the server.

Questions

What am I missing? Is there a function I'm not running to trigger Odoo to update what it serves from the static folder?
How does Odoo work with static files in general? On the fly updates to files in the static folder don't seem to have any changes on the front end. Are the files in the static folder copied somewhere else on install, and then served from that other location?

Understanding

I understand that having images and other files change in a folder called static, doesn't make much sense functionally, and that's not my intention for this. Since I'm in development I need to make changes to files, like SCSS, JS, and images, and have those updates reflected on the front end without having to destroy and rebuild the server every time. To be clear, changes to SCSS and JS files that I've registered in .xml files and bundled with various Odoo bundles update just fine when I make changes to them and then update the theme on the backend in the theme management view.

My desire is to understand how Odoo handles the files in the static folder in general, how to update those files properly, and how to manage them while developing and for release.

user_13079528 · Answer

Answers

I've figured out an answer to the first part of the question as to what I'm doing wrong. It seems like a browser caching issue. When performing a hard reload, empty cache and hard reload, or visiting the site in an incognito window changes are reflected to imagery.
As far as I can tell Odoo is just serving files from the static folder directly. Please correct me if this is not the case.

Follow-up

Does anyone have a good solution for working with changes like this and dealing with browser caching issues?

Answer: I've set up a a couple gulp tasks that use gulp-rev (will replace with gulp-rev-all soon) rev-del and rev-rewrite to handle cache busting through appending hashes to the file names.

I'm going to try setting up Browser-sync in proxy mode to see how that deals with changes to files on reload. I'll report what I find!

Update: Browser-sync has worked well so far as expected. But was kind of useless until I figured out how to work out a fix for the problem below

Does anyone know of how to automate Odoo rebuilding SCSS, JS etc. bundles? So that on file change the theme can be updated and the results seen without having to manually update the theme on the backend to see the results?

Answer: The main task was figuring out how to get live HTML/XML updates working. Which meant building Odoo from the source, and not making any updates or changes to the theme on the backend or frontend from within the Odoo interface. Passing the option --dev xml to Odoo when starting it with odoo-bin allows for the XML code to be evaluated directly, and makes live updates possible. But this extremely helpful (almost necessary) functionality is broken when you make any updates to the them from within Odoo. I'll report on any work arounds to this, but for now as long as I don't touch the theme from within Odoo (update the theme or make edits to it with their editor) then it works great. Also I had to bypass bundling my CSS and JS with their bundler initially to get those updates working live, but may be able to go back and rebundle them now that the code is being evaluated directly.

⭐️Boilerplate and Tutorial Series ⭐️

I'm going to get my whole process for theme building dialed in and then I'll be sharing the boilerplate and build tools on GitHub and also writing and filming a tutorial series on it. Since the built in documentation on that front is straight up error filled, omits critical information and also