Tutorial¶
Installation¶
Unless you want to contribute to vdirsyncer, you should use the packages from your distribution:
- ArchLinux (AUR)
- pkgsrc
- Fedora
- Debian and Ubuntu don’t have packages, but make a manual installation especially hard. See Requests-related ImportErrors on Debian-based distributions.
If there is no package for your distribution, you’ll need to install vdirsyncer manually. There is an easy command to copy-and-paste for this as well, but you should be aware of its consequences.
Configuration¶
Note
- The example.cfg from the repository contains a very terse version of this.
- In this example we set up contacts synchronization, but calendar sync works almost the same. Just swap type = carddav for type = caldav and fileext = .vcf for fileext = .ics.
- Take a look at the Support and Known Problems page if anything doesn’t work like planned.
By default, vdirsyncer looks for its configuration file in the following locations:
- The file pointed to by the VDIRSYNCER_CONFIG environment variable.
- ~/.vdirsyncer/config.
- $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/vdirsyncer/config, which is normally ~/.config/vdirsyncer/config. This is XDG-Basedir compliant, and should help keep your $HOME clean.
The config file should start with a general section, where the only required parameter is status_path. The following is a minimal example:
[general]
status_path = ~/.vdirsyncer/status/
After the general section, an arbitrary amount of pair and storage sections might come.
In vdirsyncer, synchronization is always done between two storages. Such storages are defined in storage sections, and which pairs of storages should actually be synchronized is defined in pair section.
This format is copied from OfflineIMAP, where storages are called repositories and pairs are called accounts.
The following example synchronizes a single CardDAV-addressbook to ~/.contacts/:
[pair my_contacts]
a = my_contacts_local
b = my_contacts_remote
[storage my_contacts_local]
type = filesystem
path = ~/.contacts/
fileext = .vcf
[storage my_contacts_remote]
type = carddav
url = https://owncloud.example.com/remote.php/carddav/addressbooks/bob/default/
username = bob
password = asdf
After running vdirsyncer sync, ~/.contacts/ will contain a bunch of .vcf files which all contain a contact in VCARD format each. You can modify their content, add new ones and delete some [1], and your changes will be synchronized to the CalDAV server after you run vdirsyncer sync again. For further reference, it uses the storages vdirsyncer.storage.FilesystemStorage and vdirsyncer.storage.CarddavStorage.
[1] | You’ll want to use a helper program for this. |
More Configuration¶
Conflict resolution¶
It almost seems like it could work. But what if the same item is changed on both sides? What should vdirsyncer do? By default, it will show an ugly error message, which is surely a way to avoid the problem. Another way to solve that ambiguity is to add another line to the pair section:
[pair my_contacts]
...
conflict_resolution = b wins
Earlier we wrote that b = my_contacts_remote, so when vdirsyncer encounters the situation where an item changed on both sides, it will simply overwrite the local item with the one from the server. Of course a wins is also a valid value.
Collection discovery¶
Configuring each collection (=addressbook/calendar) becomes extremely repetitive if they are all on the same server. Vdirsyncer can do this for you by automatically downloading a list of the configured user’s collections:
[pair my_contacts]
a = my_contacts_local
b = my_contacts_remote
collections = from b
[storage my_contacts_local]
type = filesystem
path = ~/.contacts/
fileext = .vcf
[storage my_contacts_remote]
type = carddav
url = https://owncloud.example.com/remote.php/carddav/
username = bob
password = asdf
With the above configuration, vdirsyncer will fetch all available collections from the server, and create subdirectories for each of them in ~/.contacts/. For example, ownCloud’s default addressbook "default" would be synchronized to the location ~/.contacts/default/.
Vdirsyncer fetches this list on first sync, and will re-fetch it if you change your configuration file. However, if new collections are created on the server, it will not automatically start synchronizing those [2]. You should run vdirsyncer discover to re-fetch this list instead.
[2] | Because collections are added rarely, and checking for this case before every synchronization isn’t worth the overhead. |