Selfhosted @lemmy.world zerodawn @leaf.dance 10 mo. ago

What do you prefer for a self hosted calendar?

I'm looking for a google calendar replacement that isn't nextcloud, has a descent mobile app with widgets, and authentication built in. I've seen plenty of recommendations via search but i'd like to hear what you personally use and what you like about it.

24 comments

I use Nextcloud's Calendar to sync to other calendar apps over CalDAV.
- Same. Thunderbird now has native support for CalDAV and I use DAVx5 to sync it with my Android devices.
I use "radicale" as calendar server for the family. Thunderbird can talk to it directly, on Androidd, I use DAVX5 to sync them.
- I also use radicale.
  
  For events with other people I use gmail or mailbox calendar though..
I use Baikal, but it seems Nextcloud is a popular solution.
- Baikal is lean and great. I use it and sync to my Thunderbird (using the TbSync extension) and Android phone (using DAVx⁵).
- +1 on Baikal, way better than Nextcloud except for invites. There are some details that don't work as expected with inviting people and changing invites afterwards.
  
  Indeed it's not really invites-friendly. But what I like is that it's really light, and avoid cluttering my Nextcloud. My Nextcloud is just for files, syncing and sharing them. That's all, and that avoids a lot of headaches when backuping for instance.
I use radicale, DAVx5 and Simple Calendar Pro. I tried to use GNOME Calendar on the desktop, but its caldav support is too buggy to be usable, and I ended up using the calendar on my phone only.

Before simple calendar I used Etar, but it had a very annoying bug where it changed the date (or time, I don't remember) every time I edited an event. Plus, simple calendar can send birthday notifications if you have them in your contact book.
- This looks like a great fit for my use case, i'll dig into this more, thank you.
  
  +1 for this.
  
  I have radicale running for the family and we use DavX and Simple Calendar too.
  
  I personally also use Vivaldi's built in calendar and Outlook's CalDav Sync addin connected to radicale too - all works a treat
I'm going to pass for the crazy person around, but so be it : cron.

Cron can be easily configured to send mails (MAILTO variable when using standard cron), provided sendmail is available on the system. If a command called by cron outputs anything, it will send a mail with the content, which is useful by itself to warn when something goes wrong with a cron task, but also allows to do things like this:

0 9 28 9 * echo birthday John

It's really easy to get used to the syntax, it's just going from more precise to less precise, so it's "minute, hour, day, month, *". The last one can usually be ignored (it's the day of the week, I must have used it twice in my life). So here, "0 9 28 9", you read it backward and it gives : September, 28th, 9:00. Piece of cake when you get a bit of practice. And cron is everywhere, so no need to install anything. Although, since I run it on my laptop, I use fcron, which has a nice feature to run ASAP tasks which should have ran if the computer was not shut down. This way, I never miss an alert.

I use it for recurring notes (like birthday, paperwork, house cleaning tasks, holidays, etc), but also as reminders of specific dates when I expect a delivery, have a meeting, etc. For the most important messages, I make it use a script that will make a destkop notification (with notify-send) and have a voice read the message (with mimic). And of course, I also use it to actually launch programs. :)
- Sounds good for setting the events up and getting notifications part. A good calender would also let you see the upcoming events in week, month at a glance. Cron entries are non sorted lists. Is there a cron visualizer like they have visualizers for logs?
  
  I organize my crontab by having group of tasks (the programs, the holidays, the housecleaning, etc). And of those groups, the events (the non recurring tasks) come last. So I just list the crontab (crontab -l) and the list of things to come print to the screen, that block being at the end of the file. It's hard to do better than a text file to list things. :)
  
  I don't know if there is a program that lists like "what is coming this month" if you really want to filter out the rest, but it should be easy enough to write, given the format of cron rules:
  
  crontab -l | grep '*' | awk '{print $4 "," $3 "," $2 "," $1 " " $0 }' | sort -n | grep -E "^$(date '+%-m')"
  
  crontab -l : list the crontab
  
  grep '*' : keeps only rules (removing blank lines and comments)
  
  awk […] : print the whole line ($0), prepend by the 4th field (the month), the 3rd (the day), the 2nd (the hour) and the 1st (the minutes)
  
  sort -n : sort everything numerically, so that all tasks are now in their execution date order (I made awk seperate the fields with a , character so it keeps sorting numerically past the first number)
  
  date '+%-m : prints the current month, not zero padded (thanks to the '-')
  
  grep -E '^date' : keep only lines which starts with the current month number
  
  You put that in a script (like ~/bin/upcoming_events) and you're done. And then, you can call it from cron every monday get what's coming next mailed to you. :)
  
  This could but refined further to display dates in a more friendly format. But as usual, Unix is your friend. :)
Caldav?
Even though you said "isn't Nextcloud", I'd still say it's perhaps the simplest solution.

You can disable most the other apps and set calendar as the landing page. If you don't use the other features, the resource usage is very low, just a cron job that does basically nothing. I don't think disabling the default apps has much effect on the footprint, by the way.

Calendar, contacts and notes are why I still self host nextcloud. Just remember to pay/donate to Davx5, they're one of the projects that need to keep running!
I run iRedMail and there's a calendar solution built in via SOGo. Works like a charm, integrated with K9 Mail and other mail solutions that leverage CalDAV.
- I'm seeing a lot of good options involve email servers and if that's the best route then that's where i'll take things but i'd prefer nothing more than a simple, lightweight, calendar service.
  
  You might take a look at Mobilzon, but that might not be exactly what you're looking for. It's more about events than a calendar per se.
Nextcloud of course. And nothing beats the 1-day "week" view widget of Business Calendar Pro. Looks just like a desktop view. It has the best year view, too.
- Nextcloud is reall nice but if you are using many of its functions,. For just calendar it seem a bit to heavy, isn't it?
  
  Probably, but it's a surprisingly lightweight system. And if you are self hosting a calendar, it offers a lot of room for expansion when the time inevitability comes.
https://github.com/tchapi/davis/

Is a good lightweight option, but I use Nextcloud.
Check here: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/

And do a ctrl-f and look for calendar

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