odoo-activity

A terminal UI for Odoo instances, on this machine or on a remote host over ssh. One screen: host cpu/mem/uptime, every Odoo instance (systemd --user, supervisor or docker compose) with its databases nested underneath, and a detail pane for process/log/db inspection.

Full docs: https://trobz.github.io/odoo-activity

Installation

uv tool install odoo-activity

Or with pip:

pip install odoo-activity

Usage

oa                        # this machine
oa odoo@somehost          # a remote host over ssh

See Getting Started for the full quick example, Keybindings & Tabs for every key and what each tab shows, and MCP Server for oa-mcp/oa-mcp-multi — the same data exposed to an agent.

The Params tab shows ir_config_parameter secret-looking values unmasked by default — you already have a shell on this host. Pass --no-include-sensitive-information to keep odoo-db's own masking instead.

Two tabs on each side have no letter shortcut — cycle to them with [/] or click: Processes and Stacks (instance mode), Queries and Modules (database mode).

A asks odoo-db for the rows it filters out by default (its --all flag). Against a host whose odoo-db predates that flag, the tab falls back to the default rows and A says so instead of doing nothing.

Moving around

Three zones, walked with the arrow keys: the instances list, the tab strip, and the tab body.

instances list  ──enter, or ↓ off the last row──►  tab strip  ──↓──►  tab body
       ▲                                              ▲  │              │
       └──────────────────── ↑ ───────────────────────┘  └───── ↑ ──────┘
                                                          (at its top row)

enter is the way in rather than ↓, because the list is a tree: an instance with databases nested under it is never the last row, and ↓ there belongs to the row below it — which is a database, carrying the other mode's tabs. On the strip, ←/→ move between tabs and ↑ goes back to the list; in the body, ↑ at the top row goes back to the strip, and anywhere else it scrolls as usual.

While the pane is maximized (f) the strip keeps ↑ to itself — the list isn't on screen to go back to, and f is what leaves that view.

The letter shortcuts and [/] still jump straight to a tab from anywhere, and Tab/Shift+Tab still cycle focus.

Jobs (j)

queue_job's jobs grouped by function and state, numbered, with the oldest creation date and the longest wait/run in each group — which is what a job stuck in started for hours looks like. Enter opens a group as its individual jobs (numbered too, date_created/date_started each, oldest first, capped at 500), escape backs out, and enter on one of those opens its raw json.

Under the table is the tab's action strip — buttons that act on the database rather than on the row under the cursor, so they are not rows themselves. Jobs has one: Requeue jobs puts every started/enqueued job back to pending (after a confirm popup — including jobs a live worker is still running, which will then run again), clearing the dates that go with those states the way queue_job's own set_pending does — what a runner does for its own dead jobs at startup, for when a worker was killed mid-job and nothing else will revisit the row. It's offered even when the table above is empty, and the strip is hidden entirely on a tab that has no actions.

The Processes tab lists the queue_job runner as its own role. Odoo only labels a worker in ps when setproctitle is installed — with it, that label is the whole answer and costs nothing. Without it, the runner is found by its postgres connection instead: application_name names the pid outright from Odoo 16.0 on, and before that (where odoo never set it) the connection is traced by its TCP endpoint, ss or lsof saying which process holds the client port. An instance on a unix socket reports no port and can't be traced that way; if nothing can account for it, the runner just stays under HTTP Worker.

Odooly (a plugin)

Odooly ships as a plugin behind an extra, so it is installed rather than switched on:

uv tool install "odoo-activity[odooly]"     # or [all] for every bundled plugin

Installed is active — --enable-plugins=odooly (only these) and --disable-plugins=odooly (everything but these) narrow that for one run; both take a comma list or repeat, and disabling wins. A name matching nothing installed is an error rather than a silent no-op.

Without the extra, the plugin's import odooly fails, the loader skips it, and none of the actions below are offered at all.

The plugin reads ~/odooly.ini at startup and matches each database against it. Every database then carries an ODOOLY tag in the instance rows' status column — green where an environment reaches it, and the actions that need a login appear with it; red where none does, so a database missing from the ini is visible rather than silent.

Matching is by name: the instance's, stripped of what only a process manager adds (odoo-acme18-integration.service → acme18-integration), against the section names — spelled either way (-integration / -int, -staging / -stag, -production / -prod), and with a suffix allowed, since a multi-db instance is usually configured one section per database (acme18-int-db1). A section that names a database only matches that one.

Database > Toolbox then offers:

• Open odooly — copies odooly -c ~/odooly.ini --env <env> to the clipboard (-c, because odooly's own CLI looks for the ini in the working directory).
• Restore app icons — for a database restored without its filestore, where the apps menu comes up blank. It rewrites web_icon on the menus whose icon data is missing, which is what makes Odoo recompute the image from the module's own file; the ones that are fine are left alone, so running it twice is a no-op.

Jobs grows a Create test job button next to Requeue, which queues one of queue_job's own test jobs to see whether a runner picks it up, and Mail grows a Send test mail button, which prompts for a recipient and sends one real email (calling .send() directly, so it goes out synchronously rather than waiting on the mail queue cron) from the connecting user's own company address — for checking outbound mail actually reaches an inbox, not just that it queues. Mail always shows a Check port 25 button too (no odooly needed — a plain network probe, not an authenticated Odoo action): nc -z -w 3 localhost 25 on the target host, the question that matters once mail_servers is empty and Odoo falls back to localhost:25 for outgoing mail. -z (scan, no data exchange) and the timeout keep it from hanging forever if the port turns out to be open.

All three scripts live in odoo_activity/plugins/odooly/scripts/ and run on their own too:

python -m odoo_activity.plugins.odooly.scripts.restore_app_icons --env acme18-int
python -m odoo_activity.plugins.odooly.scripts.create_test_job --env acme18-int
python -m odoo_activity.plugins.odooly.scripts.send_test_mail --env acme18-int --to me@example.com

They always run on this machine, even when oa is watching a remote host: odooly reaches the instance over the network, using the ~/odooly.ini that is here, not there.

Toolbox (t) offers four tools:

• Spin a worker up (SIGTTIN) or down (SIGTTOU).
• Open shell — which copies the launch command instead of signaling, so it needs no confirm.
• Count sessions under the instance's data dir (walks the filesystem, may be slow).

Remote hosts

The target is any ssh destination — [user@]host or a ~/.ssh/config alias. Only the tools already required locally are needed, but on the remote host. Connections are multiplexed, so the first call opens the session and the rest reuse it.

Everything still refreshes on its own against a remote host, just on a slower tick — host stats and Top every 5s, the instance list every 15s. R refreshes the active tab immediately, plus the instance list and the highlighted instance's databases.

MCP server

oa-mcp [host] exposes the same read-only data as an MCP server, for an agent to work an investigation alongside a human on oa [host] — both looking at the same target. Every tool call is pinned to host (local if omitted); a host/ssh_port argument on a tool call must match the pin or is rejected.

db_query's params output is masked by default, unlike the TUI's: a tool call has no human at the screen, and the plaintext would land in the agent's context. Unmasking is launch-time only, via --include-sensitive-information on the oa-mcp/oa-mcp-multi command line — never a per-call tool argument, so no tool call can turn it on itself. mail_audit (outbound mail config — neutralization status, config parameters, alias domains, addresses, outgoing mail servers, mass_mailing state) follows the same rule for smtp_user/smtp_pass. It's a separate tool rather than another db_query command: odoo-db's mail answers one nested object, not the flat row list every db_query command shares — the same reason the TUI renders it through its own panes/mail.py instead of the generic table pane.

--enable-odooly is the same launch-time-only pattern, for the one non-read-only exception: list_odooly_envs, instance_odooly_env, and odooly_run_script match a database against ~/odooly.ini and run the packaged scripts (create_test_job, restore_app_icons, send_test_mail — the last needs to), the same actions the TUI's odooly plugin offers a human through the Toolbox — now callable by the agent directly.

oa-mcp-multi instead leaves the target per-call, capped by --host-filter (an odoo dbfilter-style regex; unset means unrestricted) and --host-file (which ~/.ssh/config-style file reads aliases from).

Both default to the stdio transport (spawned by the MCP client); add --transport streamable-http --bind-host ... --bind-port ... to run as a network server instead.

Managers

An instance's manager — systemd, supervisor, odoosh or docker — is discovered per instance, not configured, and decides which controller process/log/start-stop-restart lookups route through:

• systemd — a systemd --user unit, controlled via systemctl --user.

• supervisor — a supervisorctl status program, controlled via supervisorctl.

• odoosh — the odoo.sh build a host is running, when odoo-activity itself runs directly on that host (installed via requirements.txt at build time, same as odoo-config/odoo-db). One host is one build, so there's nothing to enumerate — the whole box is "the instance". Start/stop isn't supported (odoo.sh handles sleep/wake on its own); restart goes through odoosh-restart, needed on PATH — which ships pre-installed on odoo.sh hosts.

• docker — a docker compose project running Odoo, doodba-shaped or not. One project is one instance (the odoo container and its postgres are two halves of the same thing), named after the project; a project running several odoo services shows one row each, as <project>/<service>. Stopped projects are listed too, so s can start them.

  Everything is probed inside the odoo container — ps, the config file, signals — because that is where the instance's pids, paths and logs actually are. The database tabs reach postgres over the compose network, using the address of the db container and the credentials from the container's own odoo.conf, so nothing has to be published to the host. Logs come from docker logs (an odoo image writes to stdout, not to a logfile). Start/stop/restart go through the project's own invoke start|restart when it has a tasks.py — doodba's, which is what a developer already drives it with — and fall back to docker compose otherwise. Stopping always uses docker compose stop: doodba's own invoke stop is docker compose down, which deletes the containers, and the instance would then vanish from the list instead of reading stopped, with nothing left to start it from.

  Limitation: Linux only. Everything above assumes the docker daemon runs on the same kernel as the box odoo-activity is probing, which is true on Linux and on a remote Linux server over ssh. On Docker Desktop (macOS/Windows) the containers live inside a VM: docker ps still answers, but the compose network isn't routable from the host, so the database tabs won't connect. Fixing that means publishing the db port and reading it back from docker port — not implemented yet.

Config tab modes

e cycles the Config tab through odoo-config's compact/explain/ expand/clean views of the highlighted instance's config file — see odoo-config's CLI docs for what each one shows.

ODOO_ACTIVITY_DB_ROLE overrides the postgres role used to resolve an instance's databases (default: the instance's db_user, falling back to its name).

Architecture

odoo_activity/
├── host.py            # local vs ssh command dispatch
├── probes.py          # all system data: no Textual import, shared by the TUI and MCP server
├── mcp_server.py      # oa-mcp / oa-mcp-multi: probes.py as a read-only MCP tool API
├── panes/detail.py    # ActivityPane: the one stateful rendering widget
├── panes/processes.py   # Processes tab: workers grouped by role
├── panes/stacks.py    # Stacks tab: parsed dumpstacks, busy-first
├── panes/mail.py       # Mail tab: one Rich table per section, into the log body
├── plugins/__init__.py  # the plugin contract and its entry-point loader
├── plugins/odooly/    # the odooly plugin: env matching, its scripts, its contributions
└── tui.py             # app shell: layout, list, timers, actions

• host.py — a Host is this machine or an ssh destination. Every probe takes one and runs the same way against either, so nothing above this layer knows whether it is local or remote.
• probes.py — pure functions, no UI. Every systemctl/supervisorctl/ ps/psql call and /proc read lives here, returning plain dicts/lists so it's testable without spinning up a screen. An instance's databases, logfile and top all resolve from one config: its <workdir>/config/{odoo.conf,server.conf}.
• mcp_server.py — thin @mcp.tool() wrappers over probes.py, no logic of its own; the same data the TUI shows, for an agent instead of a human (see MCP server).
• panes/detail.py — ActivityPane, the one stateful render widget: a tab strip over a Log/DataTable/Tree, mode-switched by whatever's highlighted (see Modes below) — not a separate popup screen. Delegates the Processes, Stacks, and Mail tab bodies to panes/processes.py/ panes/stacks.py/panes/mail.py.
• tui.py — the shell only: compose() layout, the nested instances+dbs ListView, focus/highlight wiring, refresh timers, start/stop/restart. Delegates rendering to ActivityPane, data to probes.py, confirm popups to panes/confirm.py's ConfirmScreen (shared with ActivityPane, which also confirms mutating actions like Toolbox).

Modes

ActivityPane mode-switches on whatever's highlighted in the instances list:

• Instance mode — an instance row is highlighted. Tabs: Top, Processes, Stacks, Logs, Config, Toolbox.
• Database mode — one of its nested database rows is highlighted. Tabs: Queries, Users, Locks, Jobs, Crons, Mail, Modules, Params, Toolbox.

Both modes share the same tab strip and Log/DataTable widgets (just a _mode flag), and several letter-key shortcuts are reused across them for whichever tab they map to in each (e.g. l is Logs in instance mode, Locks in database mode).

Data sources

• Instances — systemctl --user list-units, supervisorctl status and docker ps (compose labels), merged by name.
• Databases — each instance's <workdir>/config/{odoo.conf,server.conf} gives a db role (or ODOO_ACTIVITY_DB_ROLE); psql lists the databases owned by that role. A container's config names its own role, address and password instead, and ODOO_ACTIVITY_DB_ROLE (a convention of this box's cluster) deliberately doesn't apply to it.
• Top — the manager gives the instance's master pid (systemctl ... -p MainPID / supervisorctl pid); ps -eo pid,ppid,user,%mem,args is then walked down the ppid tree from there to find every worker.
• Logs — the same config gives logfile, tailed by reading backward in fixed-size chunks from the end so a multi-GB file costs a few reads, not a full scan. A container has no logfile: docker logs gives the snapshot and docker logs -f the stream.
• Config — read-only: odoo-config {compact,explain,expand,clean} is run against the instance's config file and its plain-text stdout is shown as-is; the version passed to it comes from odoo-addons-path <workdir> --verbose --format json's version key.
• Params — odoo-db params <db> reads ir_config_parameter; / filters rows by key or value. Values are shown as they are: odoo-db masks secret-looking ones (password, token, an enterprise_code, ...) as ******** by default, so the TUI always runs it with --include-sensitive-information.
• Mail — odoo-db mail <db> audits outbound mail config (config parameters, per-company alias domains, addresses, outgoing mail servers, relevant modules) as one nested object rather than a flat row list. Unlike every other db tab, it doesn't go through the generic table renderer: the sections don't share columns, so panes/mail.py renders each non-empty one as its own table in the log body instead (/ search and the generic DataTable are unused here). Outgoing mail servers is shown first — whether mail leaves the box at all is the most important question — with test-catcher/known-relay/neutralization-stub detection surfaced as summary lines below the table rather than per-row columns. Mail always shows a Check port 25 button alongside Send test mail (see the Jobs/Mail actions paragraph above). A neutralized database (database.is_neutralized — every odoo.sh staging build) leads with its own red banner, since it's the single most common reason mail never leaves an Odoo database at all. With the odooly plugin installed, it grows a Send test mail button (see Odooly below).