Setting up Radicale – LandChad.net

Radicale is an open source calDAV server. CalDAV is a widely supported internet standard for calendars, todo-lists and contacts. Hosting your own calDAV server allows sharing calendars between mutliple devices.

More information can be found on the projects offical website: radicale.org.

Installing Radicale

Firstly, we have to install radicale on our system, luckily for us radicale is packaged for the most used distros.

apt install radicale apache2-utils

Next we need to configure Radicale. We configure radicale to be accessible from other machines, how Radicale and where the files should be stored. Open /etc/radicale/config with your favourite editor and add this configuration.

[server]
+# Bind all addresses
+hosts = 0.0.0.0:5232, [::]:5232
+
+[auth]
+type = htpasswd
+htpasswd_filename = /etc/radicale/users
+htpasswd_encryption = md5
+
+[storage]
+filesystem_folder = /var/lib/radicale/collections

+ +

As you can see under [auth] we use htpasswd to manage the users. Execute the following command to add a new user to Radicale.

htpasswd -c /etc/radicale/users username

As Radicale stands now it is fully functional and after starting it by executing its binary, can be accessed under example.org:5232. But there are two additional things we can do to make using and managing Radicale way easier.

Setting up a Nginx reverse proxy

Because the URL of your Radicale server is an URL you will have to remember and enter it on any device you want to use your calendar on it is advised to set up a reverse proxy.

server {
+	listen 443 ssl;
+	listen [::]:443 ssl;
+	server_name cal.example.org;
+	location / {
+		proxy_pass http://localhost:5232/; # The / is important!
+	}
+	# You can also leave these two lines out and use certbot
+	ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/nginx/cal.example.com/fullchain.pem;
+	ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/nginx/cal.example.com/privkey.pem;
+}

Run as a service

Running Radicale as a service makes managing it much easier. Add this config to /etc/systemd/system/radicale.service.

[Unit]
+Description=A simple CalDAV (calendar) and CardDAV (contact) server
+
+[Service]
+ExecStart=/usr/bin/env python3 -m radicale
+Restart=on-failure
+
+[Install]
+WantedBy=default.target

After creating the config load, start and enable the service with the following commands.

systemctl daemon-reload
+systemctl enable --now radicale

Contribution

Author: Jocomol – jocomol.ch -- XMR: 41kLv68Nk4N3zvTRFYtHZfRRFMgXkxK2FcXDeCSa4yNwBGTBa1WQ8HtXL8cCAcoZ2iSLBCS6HQqdpRSf56ecMBgWTkn2ARt +