Wax is a build system and development environment for Odoo, in Nix. It is a nix flake, and uses standard tools like virtualenv and git to set up the development environment. There is no need to prepare your system with the correct python interpreter or correct c development files. You just need to have the nix package manager installed, and have the flake feature enabled.

Almost all generated files are put inside in the wax directory of your working directory, so that you only need to add one entry to your .gitignor 9550 e file, and so that your work environment stays tidy. There are however several lock files generated to keep your environment reproducable.

Here is an example Nix flake for you Odoo project:

flake.nix:

{
  description = "A Wax example";

  inputs = {
    wax.url = "github:bamidev/wax";
  };

  outputs = { self, wax }: {
    devShells.x86_64-linux.default = wax.lib.mkOdooShell {
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      config =  import ./config.nix;
    };
  };
}

config.nix:

{
  odooVersion = "16.0";
  databaseName = "my-database";

  odooConfig = {
    options = {
      workers = 4;
    };
  };

  repos.spec = {
    odoo = {
      ref = "16.0";
      url = "https://github.com/odoo/odoo.git";
      remotes = {   # Git remotes here
        bamidev = "https://github.com/bamidev/odoo.git";
      };
      merges = {    # All commits that will be merged into the repo
        bamidev = "16.0-fix-a-thing";
      };
    }

    partner-contact = {
      # When the ref attribute is not set, will default to what is in odooVersion
      # When the url attribute is not set, will default to https://github.com/OCA/partner-contact.git
      remotes = {
        therp = "https://github.com/Therp/partner-contact.git";
      };
      # When multiple branches from the same repo need to be merged in, we can't use attrsets, so
      # use lists instead:
      merges = [
        ["therp" "16.0-add-partner_multi_relation_address"]
        ["therp" "16.0-add-partner_multi_relation_function"]
      ];
    };

    # Leaving these empty means you will get standard server-tools and web repos from the OCA
    server-tools = {};
    web = {};
  };

  pythonRequirements = [
    "psycopg2"
    "debugpy"
  ];

  # Optional:
  repos.depth.deepen.base = 500;
  repos.depth.deepen.merge = 50;
  repos.depth.initial.base = 10;
  repos.depth.initial.merge = 20;
}

Assuming you have your configuration like as the example above, you can enter the development environment with nix develop. After everything has been installed and you're inside the environment, the TL;DR to get started is:

build
run

The build command will set everything up. You can just remove the wax folder if you want to completely rebuild everyting from scratch again. Moreover, the build command really just runs the following commands inchronological order:

build-venv builds the virtual environment. Building the virtual environment may fail if you have pythonRequirements that are causing conflicts with eachother, or in combination with the packages or python version that are provided through Wax itself. To fix this, you can try:

rm -rf requirements.lock wax/venv
build-venv

build-repos builds the git repositories. If you need to update a repository to a later commit, you can remove the commit hash from the repos.lock file (or remove the file altogether), and run build-repos again.

If you remove the wax/repos folder, and then run build-repos for a second time again, it will prepare the exact same code as the first time, provided that the repos.lock file is the same.

build-addons builds the directory of addon links wax/addons. You don't need to delete anything to reset it, just run build-addons and it will be rebuild from scratch.

build-config (re)builds the odoo configuration file.

There is also the shell command, to run the Odoo shell.

Runs Odoo. You may not see any output in most cases, because by default, the output is logged to wax/log/odoo.log.

Installs some development related python packages into the virtual environment.

The same as:

build
setup-dev

Most configuration is done within your flake, within the config attrset.

There will be more documentation about the config soon. For the moment, you will have to make do with the example above.