When Odoo is restarted, the configuration file is read. The value of the addons_path variable is expected to be a comma-separated list of directories. Relative paths are accepted, but they are relative to the current working directory and therefore should be avoided in the configuration file.

At this point, the new addons present in ~/odoo-dev/local-addons are not available in the list of available addon modules of the instance. For this, you need to perform an extra operation explained in the next recipe, Updating the addon modules list.