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