Website Frontend Broken in Odoo? Here's What Went Wrong and How I Fixed It

🔍 The Problem

Recently, our Odoo website frontend suddenly broke. Styles were missing, JavaScript wasn’t working — it was a complete UI meltdown. After digging through the logs and inspecting the server, I found the smoking gun:

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/lib/odoo/odoo-data/filestore/re-cloud-website/27/27ab4bc01c7f509cdbf4ea8b81dce1ce766c8145'

Odoo also returned a 500 Internal Server Error when trying to load:

/web/assets/1/8c95773/web.assets_frontend.min.css

🧠 Root Cause

There were two main issues at play here:

1. Frontend Asset Bundles Weren’t Fully Loaded

Odoo’s website UI heavily depends on precompiled JavaScript and CSS bundles (like web.assets_frontend). If these bundles aren’t loaded correctly or are corrupted, the website won’t render properly.

2. Attachment Collisions in the Filestore

Odoo stores compiled assets as attachments in the database and saves their binary files in the filestore. When Odoo regenerates these bundles, it might detect older files already in place and refuse to overwrite them, especially if there’s a checksum mismatch or file permission issue.

In my case, the problem involved these two files:

• web.assets_frontend.css
• web.assets_frontend_minimal.js

The asset compilation process completed, but the files were not properly saved or accessed — likely due to an attachment collision or missing physical file.

🛠️ The Fix

Here’s what worked for me:

1. Regenerate Asset Attachments

Odoo stores all assets in the ir.attachment table. I had to delete the old frontend asset records to force regeneration.

Here’s how you can do it from the database (⚠️ backup first!):

DELETE FROM ir_attachment WHERE url LIKE '/web/assets/%';

If you want to run python (in Version 18):

def regenerate_assets_bundles(self):
    self.search([
         ('public', '=', True),
         ("url", "=like", "/web/assets/%"),
         ('res_model', '=', 'ir.ui.view'),
         ('res_id', '=', 0),
         ('create_uid', '=', SUPERUSER_ID),
    ]).unlink()
    self.env.registry.clear_cache('assets')

model: ir.attachment

Then restart Odoo. It will rebuild the missing assets automatically.

2. Upgrade the web Module

Even after cleaning attachments, some cache can linger. Running an upgrade on the web module clears all frontend assets and forces a rebuild:

./odoo-bin -d your_db_name -u web

Or you can upgrade module web in your Odoo system.

This is a more reliable fix if manual deletion doesn’t work.

🚀 Bonus Tip: Always Check Permissions

Ensure the Odoo process user has read/write access to the filestore path, or else asset regeneration will silently fail or throw file errors.

📌 Conclusion

If your Odoo frontend suddenly looks broken:

• Check your logs for missing asset files.
• Clear the ir.attachment entries related to web assets.
• Upgrade the web module for a full cache refresh.

This kind of issue is subtle but common — especially after migrations, server restores, or upgrades.

Stay tuned for more tips like this at GreenSpaxe!