Self Hosted Calendar Options

Third party integrations
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I am trying to move away from Google for calendar and tasks and thought there would be a number of self-hosted options for something which seems relatively trivial but turns out I was wrong… My main reason for integration is to build a family planner type dashboard to go on a touchscreen.

Requirement are:

  • Calendar integrates into HA
  • iOS and Android access with comparable experience to Google apps
  • fully self hosted
  • secure and local

so with that in mind the first thing that came up was NextCloud which seems to be s sprawling mess and outdated. I did get it working but the amount of resources to run a couple of calendars and the a brief look under the covers really puts me off. On top of that when I did integrate the calendar it showed up but I was unable to create events in HA (but being a sprawling mess it was proved very difficult to figure out if this is a HA or NextCloud issue).

So next on the list was Baïkal but given the main developer posted in 2017 (After 10 years, I'm stopping my work on sabre/dav) and whilst there are releases these all seem almost exclusively just bumping external dependencies which doesn’t feel great in terms of addressing vulnerabilities that might turn up etc. This also doesn’t actually work with HA without hacking the code (which again doesn’t make me want to use it if the maintainers are willing or wanting to change things)

Which then lead to Radicale which looks like it could be workable but whilst I could get the calendar into HA, just like NextCloud I can only view the calendar in HA not create events.

These are all CalDav implementations (which I think is realistically the only way of doing this?) and probably all using the same underlying CalDav implementation. This seems to also mean there is a 15 minute sync delay so adding something on one device won’t appear on another for a while?

I am quite surprised there aren’t any better / more modern offerings out there for what I would have thought is one of the biggest privacy things for people?

Am I missing something or these really the best (only) options out there or does anyone have advice on how to make the most of these tools?

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I empathize with your predicament.

More bad news is that maintenance for the CalDAV integration is community-based so any bugs must wait for a volunteer to resolve (there’s no designated maintainer).

I mention this because the CalDAV integration has long-standing unresolved Issues.

I use it for integrating with Apple Calendar and although it works it does log a few warnings, notably that the integration employs a blocking call while it’s in the event loop (the dev team has attempted to fix all integrations that do this). CalDAV continues to do it, probably because no one is willing to volunteer their time and effort.

Given that it rarely gets attention, even for bug fixes, it’s unlikely it will get new features any time soon (such as an action to create an event).

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All of what he said…

I have my calendar on my Synology NAS. CalDav works with HA and with Android phones, but with the delay you mention.

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