[HN Gopher] Rediscovering CardDAV
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Rediscovering CardDAV
Author : jandeboevrie
Score : 152 points
Date : 2020-04-12 11:18 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jpmens.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (jpmens.net)
| slim wrote:
| there's an excellent easy to setup python carddav/caldav server
|
| https://radicale.org/2.1.html
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I've used this for self hosting contacts and calendar for many
| years now and it had been very low maintenance and good. Shared
| calendar with SO, synced across all devices. I even copy/paste
| pics of many contacts to have little icons and stuff in the db.
| Love it.
| mqus wrote:
| Same for me, it was basically set&forget. I recently added
| the InfCloud integration, which basically is a webclient for
| caldav/carddav, hosted within the radicale instance, which is
| very nice if you want to check things without your device.
|
| [1]https://github.com/Unrud/RadicaleInfCloud
| girzel wrote:
| This is what I've been using, but it appears to be abandoned
| now?
|
| I finally got the caldav part of it to work for a group of
| people using various flavors of Mac, Linux, and Windows -- PCs
| and phones. It was a huge pain in the ass, because each client
| accepted a different form of base-url-plus-calendar-locator,
| and some very non-technical users were on the other side of the
| planet, and it took weeks of trial and error before we got
| everything working.
|
| Carddav looks hopeless, I can't even something that works
| between DavX5 on my android phone, and whatever the hell my
| wife's iPhone needs, and we're in the same room.
| abawany wrote:
| The iphone seems to be very particular about which
| caldav/carddav implementations it works with. I had to move
| through 2 different email/caldav/cardav providers before
| landing on mailbox.org, whose implementation sync fine with
| the iphone ime.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| > This is what I've been using, but it appears to be
| abandoned now?
|
| The last commit to master on their GitHub repo[0] was
| yesterday[1]
|
| [0] https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale
|
| [1] https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/commit/27ac0ed0256bf3f5
| bc8...
| laiaondono2 wrote:
| hohla2
| mcds_author wrote:
| I've been using mcds as a command line interface to a CardDav
| server.
|
| https://github.com/t-brown/mcds
| zafiro17 wrote:
| This was useful to me: I've had trouble managing vcard with mutt,
| and without mutt I'd probably have to give up email. I began
| using caldav for a similar reason: I'm on Android and my wife is
| on iOS, and it annoyed me that Android tries desperately to
| standardize you on Gmail and addressbook, while iOS insists you
| use iCloud. I like maintaining a degree as independence.
|
| I'm not as clever as the individual who wrote this useful blog,
| but in my case I set up an account with Fruux, who offers vcard
| and vcal as a service. It syncs perfectly across several OSes (on
| Windows I used eMclient, and on Linux as I mentioned I've
| struggled). Anyone who wants to avoid setting up custom servers,
| Fruux handles that part easily.
|
| This afternoon I'll try to see if I can get vdirsyncer and khard
| working. I _really_ wish the likes of thunderbird and kmail
| offered better carddav and caldav support. Evolution does, but I
| 'm not a huge fan of Evolution (and not sure why).
| cerberusss wrote:
| As far as I know, Android doesn't support CalDAV or CardDAV.
| Any apps I tried were lacking in some way or another. How did
| you get Android to sync with Fruux?
| abawany wrote:
| I used DAVx5 from Bitfire (available on F-Droid and the Play
| Store) and it works very well. It is able to sync on multiple
| devices and from multiple providers.
| lorenzfx wrote:
| I have been quite happy with https://dmfs.org/caldav/. There
| is also a carddav client from the same publisher.
| bad_user wrote:
| Fastmail also provides syncing of contacts via CardDAV [1].
|
| Works great with iOS and MacOS out of the box, never had issues
| with it.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/servernamesandports....
| thedanbob wrote:
| The only issue I've had with CardDAV on FastMail is a
| ridiculously obscure edge case: it doesn't like the ID strings
| of rooms on my Matrix server (e.g.
| !randomcharacters:example.com -- it strips out the colon and
| everything after it). Fortunately, iCloud doesn't mangle them
| and and the contacts app on iOS lets you merge contacts from
| multiple sources.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Have you contacted FastMail support about the
| escaping/truncation bug you describe? What was their reply?
| thedanbob wrote:
| You know, it didn't even occur to me to contact them at the
| time since I was able to find a workaround. But that's a
| good idea, I'll see what they have to say.
|
| Edit: looks like they found and fixed the issue on their
| own, I just tried it again and it worked.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > I can no longer sync iOS' Contacts with my macOS Catalina's
| Finder
|
| I'm not sure I understand what this means; how does Finder access
| and sync contacts?
| philo23 wrote:
| The iOS (and iPod) sync portion of iTunes is now built into the
| Finder in macOS Catalina, now that iTunes has been split up
| into different apps (Music, Podcasts, etc)
| deng wrote:
| I myself use DAVx^5 with NextCloud for many years and it works
| fine. But having written quite a bit of client code for CalDAV,
| let me tell you these are really arcane protocols in dire need of
| replacement. It's really no fun at all, and I wish "we all" could
| move to something a bit more modern (which essentially means:
| something more RESTy). I have no idea how this could work,
| though...
| mercutio2 wrote:
| WebDAV is about as RESTy as you're likely to ever see.
| Collections containing different resources, different behaviors
| based on ContentType, extensible to allow different types of
| data. Behavior and state determined by hypertext.
|
| Usually when people say they don't like CalDAV or CardDAV, they
| mean they don't like XML, non-GET verbs, and Versit Consortium
| syntax (none of which are in conflict with REST)?
|
| I'll admit Versit syntax, with it's significant whitespace,
| among other warts, is a bit of a pain.
|
| JMAP is really the same data model as CardDAV and CalDAV, just
| with different encodings of everything, if that's what you
| want.
| pferde wrote:
| https://jmap.io/spec.html perhaps?
| deng wrote:
| Yes, I really hope that JMAP succeeds and applaud Fastmail
| for taking this on. The problem of course is that there's a
| huge drag in getting new protocols like these established.
| One problem is that Fastmail works with Cyrus, but Dovecot
| seems to be much more popular nowadays. Of course, getting a
| new protocol into Dovecot is a pretty big undertaking, but I
| hope they will eventually find the time to do this.
| [deleted]
| jsilence wrote:
| Really wish GroupDAV would have gained more traction.
| privong wrote:
| I've been using a similar setup for probably 8+ years now. It
| started out with an ownCloud instance on a Raspberry Pi B+ (but
| has since evolved to nextCloud and a VPS, which I also use to run
| other things). I've been incredibly happy with it. I didn't have
| to worry about moving my contacts over when I switch to a new
| device (whether that be laptop or phone) - I just have to add the
| synchronization to the new device. This, plus calDav (I just
| `khal` and `todoman` for CLI calendar and to-do lists) have been
| excellent.
| 7402 wrote:
| I spent a lot of time last year looking for alternatives to
| iCloud for local syncing of calendar, notes, and contacts for
| macOS iOS. It's real easy to spend a lot of time banging your
| head against a wall trying to get things working.
|
| I learned to be suspicious of any posts that said things like
| "This should work!" instead of "Here are step by step
| instructions for what I actually did that worked for me under
| these conditions on this date." Things that work for Windows
| don't necessarily work for Macs. Things that work at one time,
| don't necessarily work at another time.
|
| Sometimes there was just one little detail missing, obvious
| afterwards but undocumented and costing an hour or two of messing
| around to find. Sometimes I gave up on a promising solution (such
| as radicale) because I just couldn't find that one missing step.
| That's why complete documentation of someone's experience is so
| valuable for someone trying to recreate another person's success.
|
| Here's what worked for me (on Jan 2019), a setup that used
| apache, DAViCal, postfix, dovecot on CentOS 7 in VirtualBox on
| macOS 10.14:
|
| "Replacement of macOS Server: Calendar, Contacts, and Mail"
| https://7402.org/blog/2019/replacement-macos-server.html
|
| It was broken by the end of year due to changes by Apple,
| requiring the following fix (as of Dec 2019):
|
| "New self-signed SSL Certificate for iOS 13"
| https://7402.org/blog/2019/new-self-signed-ssl-cert-ios-13.h...
|
| Good luck. It's satisfying to get one's own server working, but
| it might take on-going maintenance.
| omio wrote:
| I remember years ago getting mysql, php, nginx, dovecot,
| postfix and horde to work together to get ActiveSync to my
| android. Took a long time and lots of reading but in the end it
| felt great. Then a week later a horde update broke it.
|
| In hindsight it's probably better to spend the money on a
| hosted solution.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I've been running Radicale for years! I pulled all my Google
| contacts back in 2013 and have been using it and DavDroid (now
| DAVx5 in the article) for years. I never bought the app but have
| sent money to their donation link.
|
| Here's a dockerfile for Radicale if anyone wants to try it:
|
| https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/tree/master/dockerfiles/Radic...
|
| CardBook for Thunderbird is another great plugin. Between all
| those tools, I have cal/contact sync across my Linux boxes and
| Android devices.
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(page generated 2020-04-12 23:00 UTC)