my eXPeriences

Odoo permission denied html4css1.css error when updating base

After updating odoo 18 on an ubuntu box with the latest security fix, I issued the simple

sudo -u odoo odoo -u base -d my-database

command - thinking I'll update all modules to be on the safe side. I was wrong to think it's simple, got the following errors:

2025-10-14 11:17:41,804 152590 ERROR my-database odoo.modules.registry: Failed to load registry
2025-10-14 11:17:41,804 152590 CRITICAL my-database odoo.service.server: Failed to initialize database `my-database`.
...
FileNotFoundError: File not found: base/static/description/index.html
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
...
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'html4css1.css'

Took a while to find out, but the problem is that docutils wants to write to the working directory, which was not writable by the odoo user (which runs the upgrade command).

Change to any other directory where the odoo user can write to (/tmp for example), then run the same command again.

Don't know what will come here, let's wait and see... But in the first instance it will be a login box (for myself):

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