Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

I know I will probably get pushback over this, but CalDAV sucks. People say that it's great and that it's easy; yet if that were true there would be way more self-hosted CalDAV solutions out there and they would be far more ergonomic than what's available. I was not impressed with Radicale. Because there's really only one calendar file I wanted to serve to myself, I tried implementing my own CalDAV server just for that purpose and pretty much gave up because of how unintuitive and complicated it was merely to make a single file available. I can see why it would be needed if sharing a calendar with other people with calendar apps that support CalDAV, but I think it's kind of a waste of time if hosting a calendar for one's self.

Instead, initially went with the approach of hosting my dynamically updating iCal file in an S3 bucket and using ICSx5 on Android to sync with it. No CalDAV needed – just HTTPS.

However, FOSS calendars for Android still suck, and for some reason I couldn't get ICSx5 to work within GrapheneOS, so I now use almost the same approach but with Proton Calendar which happens to support calendars from direct links to iCal files. It's not perfect, but it suits my needs enough.

I think the author's approach for using iCalendar format is a good one, though what I've discovered is the amount of support for various iCalendar features varies drastically between calendar software. Rather than dealing with that headache, I somewhat gave up and decided to shove most metadata into the description field rather than use the respective properties.

EDIT: My use case is software I wrote to grab data from various sites (Eventbrite, Meetup, pub trivia companies, public event calendars, etc.), filter for only social events I would be interested in, and combine them into a single calendar I can view in my normal calendar software.

Another CalDav server I can recommend is Radicale. It's written in python and designed in a pretty modular way, enabling authentication and authorization (and more) plugins.

Data is saved in plain text files and I track/backup it using git.

Over the time I've accumulated some interesting modifications:

- Authentication runs with pam on the host system.

- To enable sharing of calendars I run a periodic script symlinking the calendars to all authorized users. Unfortunately this suffers from combinatiorial explosion.

- Using a rights plugin with custom CalDav Attributes and a modified web plugin I added support for access Control Lists.

- To enable public calendars you give read permissions to the `public` user using ACL. Then a nginx hack gives blanket acces for read operations:

  location /public {
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:{%RADICALE_PORT%};
      include proxy_params;
      proxy_set_header Authorization "Basic {%RADICALE_PUBLIC_AUTH%}";
      proxy_hide_header Authorization;
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin * always;
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET, OPTIONS, PROPFIND";
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Depth";
      limit_except GET OPTIONS PROPFIND { deny all; }
  }

I should probably write a blog post about the setup.

This is exactly the post I've needed.

I have two calendars, one on my personal server running Mailcow (SoGO) and my work calendar with Fastmail.

They don't work together- I've never found a way to get mailcow's calendar to work with other tools well, and so I spend time syncing between them semi-manually.

I've wanted to de-couple the calendar for a while but the only alternative I knew about was Nextcloud, which I think is a bit heavy weight.

This Baïkal looks great and I can't wait to give it a try. Doing this will also allow me to explore changing out Mailcow for another self-hosted mail service.

I too have been on a very aggressive mission to decloudify myself lately(as in, since comrade musk and co took over everything and I have 0 reason to trust him or anyone around him). And to be fair, for all the hundreds of gigabytes of data I have, the migration took no longer than two weeks, on and off, and it works infinitely better than I was hoping. The only service I've outsourced is email since I hate dealing with MX records, IMAP/SMTP. For everything else, the one thing that did wonders was an Asus PN40 with a dual core celeron CPU. It's biggest strength is that it's both accessible and has a slot for an M.2 NVME and a SATA drive so you can have a safe backup in one spot. I too share the opinion that CalDAV is kind of sketchy. That said, Nextcloud covered most of my needs(although it can be slow for some things, even with redis backing it up). Calendars, dropbox/google drive, docs, photos, backups and automatic syncing - it covers everything really well. That, combined with several other open source solutions truly cover all my needs(music and video streaming, monitoring, alerting, vpn, readers, management, and various other utilities). And as under-powered this mini PC is, it handles everything insanely well with lots of room to spare, given that my ISP is a solid 10/10. In fact it would be perfectly capable of handling another 5-6 people like me with ease.

Everything old is new again.

Back in the early 2000's I used Mozilla Sunbird to host my calendar on my personal Win2k server via IIS's WebDAV module… I don't think CardDAV was a thing yet but I might be mistaken.

I ended up importing all that data from it into my Google Calendar which is kind of fun because I've got all my homework and whatnot for college courses on there if you go back far enough.

Baikal looks interesting. I used DAViCal[0] in the past to share calendars between a couple of Apple iOS devices. When it worked it worked well, but as iOS versions changed it seemed to get unreliable and I eventually gave up.

When I do eventually revisit this I am going to look at DAViCal again, as well as Radicale[1], and now Baikal.

[0] https://www.davical.org/

[1] https://radicale.org/v3.html

I've been using Baikal for a few years now and it's very solid, although it's just for myself and I don't have all of OP's requirements. For my desktop I just use Thunderbird's built in calendar to connect, and on my phone I use DAVx5 and Fossify Calendar from F-Droid. It's forked from Simple Mobile Tools's Calendar app, but unlike the name it's actually the most fully-featured calendar app I've seen. It's "simple" in the way that it just presents you with every option instead of forcing you do dig through half a dozen menus and dialogs to do what you want to do, which is very nice.

I have Outlook (at work) and Google Calendar (at home) and synchronising them through HTTP is completely unreliable. They seem to mess the time zone all the time, sometimes they publish in UTC, sometimes not, with the consequence of having meeting always at the wrong time.

I really don't understand how these 2 major providers cannot fix what seems to me such a basic feature.

If using my own system would solve it, I'd do it immediately, but I am afraid that it would be just the same: meeting created on Outlook and imported with 2 hours difference.

Nice!. I would like to do something like this but for Photos. I want to get off Dropbox and Google for a while. At the top of my list are:

1. Create a memories like feature from my photos to send on my cell phone, grouping by different features I like: anniversaries, similar activities, A `Me an X(X is Spouse, family, friends etc)`, Over the years(how x has evolved over the years).

2. Be able to save photos taken from my device to my servers.

I've set up three true-nas machines in different places with 2TB of space and want to slowly build this feature.

Another route is to go serverless and use DecSync. Thunderbird (or Evolution) will sync with the Android app (F-Droid available) and your Cal, your Cards, and tasks, and even RSS will be replicated on the other peers.

https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync

"My calendar is a true nightmare."

Check

"calendar systems suck. All of them."

Double check

"I’m trying to break off of big tech as much as I can"

I wish I could check this more ...

I've had similar needs/desires/gripes with my calendars and the terrible state of calendaring apps for a while. So thank you for scratching your own itch and sharing it with us.

I'm curious when you say that "[CalDAV] is an area begging for disruption". Can you enlighten us as to what your wishlist could be for (a) better protocol/systems/ecosystem might be? (a rant about your pain points might work too).

Thanks again!

This is the kind of thing I think about doing every so often, before realizing it would take me a lot more time, energy, and money than I'm willing to spend to save 10 minutes once a week manually copying my work events from GCal to Etar on my phone and vice versa, and both to the weekly dry erase calendar on my wall.

My recurring events are all blocked off on the calendars already ("private" for personal events on my work calendar), so it really is quite a quick update.