Hey All, I am just getting started in my journey. Part of my goals is to de-google my life and am looking to start with my calendar. I want to to sync with my laptop and my phone. I was going to start reading about nextcould because it seems like it would have the stuff I need and more. My question is what does the community use, so that I can read and research about it. No technical questions yet.
Edit: Not sure why I cannot see the replies when signed in (visible when logged out). Will be checking out your suggestions. Thanks Self Hosted community!
Nextcloud is technically a solid product if your goal is to replace all the Google services. Personally I think it’s too heavy and I’ve had issues with using it vs using specialized apps for each service I’m replacing.
I still run it on a 10 year old chromebox (replacing chrome with linux of course). It’s really not that heavy. If it seems very slow, I’d try rebuilding the database from a dump (if mysql/mariadb), and making sure the db is on a fast drive. At least, those two things made a huge difference for me. Also, some people reported huge speedups switching to postgres.
setting up memcache was the biggest improvement for me.
Radicale. Not the fastest, but has worked for years.
+1 for Radicale as a CalDAV server
The calendar on Vivaldi browser is a good enough client for me on a laptop.
I also sync to my phone with DAVx5 and view with fossify calendar from F-Droid
I use and recommend Baikal.
Nextcloud calendar
Home Assistant. I wouldn’t use it just for calendars, but I already had it set up for home automation and calendars are a built in feature.
Does it have a way to sync with mobile devices? I’ve not run into such an integration, but thought I’d ask just in case.
The Local Calendar integration stores the calendar on the server running Home Assistant, so as long as you can access the server remotely, you should be able to access it through the Home Assistant app. If you want it stored offline on a mobile device, there’s also an integration for calendars stored in a .ics file which you could sync with something like syncthing.
Radicale on the home server, which syncs contacts and calendaring for us. Thunderbird on the desktop. Fossify Calendar on Android, synced to Radicale via DAVx⁵.
Good choice, Nextcloud has all the calendars you’ll ever need. (Same for contacts btw)
Yeah I love it. Also if you are stuck with outlook. Use Caldav synchronizer it is a add-on you can use with outlook to sync calendars with nextcloud.
Radicale on the server, exposed publicly on a “secret” subdomain.
InfCloud as a web app.
Calengoo on the phone and it also has clients for desktop (Windows, Linux, Mac).
CalDAV-Sync / CardDAV-Sync to sync on Android (although Calengoo can also connect directly to Radicale).
I tried DAVx5 for Android sync but it had issues with large calendars and would choke sometimes when it lost connectivity.
If you use let’s encrypt certificates on that subdomain it’s pretty easy to find. https://crt.sh/
Not if you get a wildcard certificate, then the CT logs only show *.example.com. The bad guys also can’t get subdomains from the DNS server without breaking into it because nowadays DNS servers don’t do public zone transfer.
You can also use a wildcard CNAME on the DNS too, just to be extra safe. That way the subdomain names only live in your reverse proxy and on your devices, effectively acting as an additional auth factor (see below though). But it only works if you don’t need to define any explicit subdomain; typically clashes with email stuff because a CNAME on *.example.com won’t allow you to also have MX on *.example.com or TXT on _dmarc.example.com.
It’s true that subdomains are not a super secret auth factor right now because of SNI (Server Name Indication) which transmits them in clear outside TLS connections, so that reverse proxies can do host-based routing. So the subdomain can be intercepted anywhere on routers, by ISP etc. It will also be freely given away to any DNS server you use to resolve them (but you can mitigate that by using DoH or DoT with a privacy-pledged DNS server). You also can’t afford to share links to your subdomain with anybody so it’s best kept for services used only by a select number of trusted people.
The SNI issue is being worked on btw, we now have Encrypted Hello (ECH) which uses DoH keys to encrypt the domain name outside TLS, but ECH is still being adopted.
Radicale just works :)
This is the stupid simple and stable solution. Nextcloud was always giving me grief but Radicale is rock solid
Another thumbs up for Radicale. Light-weight and reliable. Just one Python process and all the calendars and contacts are stored as plain files.
Waking up to a broken nextcloud (overnight! Look, no hands!) was the single reason I finally got acquainted with docker containers
I’m surprised nobody here mentioned SoGO. It’s a fully featured web mail interface that integrates contact management and a web calendar including caldav, carddav and task support. Easy up setup and easy to connect to any phone via foss apps.
I have not heard of it and it sounds like what I am looking for.
I use EteSync because it’s End-to-end encrypted and I don’t fully trust my security practices.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
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I use Nextcloud
I use EteSync to sync my contacts. It can do calendars also and has a self-hosted option. Personally I just use Proton for my calendar at the moment.
I haven’t tested any desktop syncing with EteSync, but maybe it will work for you.
I use DavMail to proxy an Exchange account so I don’t have to install Outlook on my phone.
