Odoo public web (controllers · website · portal)

The backend web client is OWL (→ odoo-owl). Everything a browser or external system hits without the backend client is this skill: an http.route, a website page, a portal document, a snippet, public JS. It fails the same way the rest of Odoo does — the route, the template, and who can reach it are composed at runtime from the installed addon graph and the acting user's groups, not knowable from one file. And the public surface adds two stakes the backend doesn't: auth (a wrong auth= exposes data to the world) and the v17/18 frontend-JS rewrite (publicWidget is being replaced by Interactions).

The rule: read the real route table, template ids, and record-rule reach from the running instance first, then write the smallest controller/template — never guess the URL, the QWeb id, or the auth level.

Version floor: Odoo 17/18, through Odoo 19 (current LTS). Frontend JS is mid-migration (publicWidget→Interactions, below). Two recent server-side renames bite here too: controller type='json' → type='jsonrpc' (v18.1), and from v18.2 public controller/model methods are RPC-callable unless marked @api.private (→ odoo-security). See the note below and skills/odoo-introspect/references/version-matrix.md.

Discover before you code (introspect-first)