Tutorial¶
Before starting, consider if you actually need vdirsyncer. There are better alternatives available for particular usecases.
Installation¶
See Installation.
Configuration¶
Note
- The config.example 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
fortype = caldav
andfileext = .vcf
forfileext = .ics
. - Take a look at the 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
. See the XDG-Basedir specification.
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 ownCloud’s addressbooks to ~/.contacts/
:
[pair my_contacts]
a = "my_contacts_local"
b = "my_contacts_remote"
collections = ["from a", "from b"]
[storage my_contacts_local]
type = "filesystem"
path = "~/.contacts/"
fileext = ".vcf"
[storage my_contacts_remote]
type = "carddav"
# We can simplify this URL here as well. In theory it shouldn't matter.
url = "https://owncloud.example.com/remote.php/carddav/"
username = "bob"
password = "asdf"
Note
Configuration for other servers can be found at Supported servers.
After running vdirsyncer discover
and vdirsyncer sync
, ~/.contacts/
will contain subfolders for each addressbook, which in turn will contain a
bunch of .vcf
files which all contain a contact in VCARD
format each.
You can modify their contents, 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 filesystem
and carddav
.
However, if new collections are created on the server, it will not
automatically start synchronizing those [2]. You need to run vdirsyncer
discover
again to re-fetch this list instead.
[1] | You’ll want to use a helper program for this. |
[2] | Because collections are added rarely, and checking for this case before every synchronization isn’t worth the overhead. |
More Configuration¶
Conflict resolution¶
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.
Metadata synchronization¶
Besides items, vdirsyncer can also synchronize metadata like the addressbook’s or calendar’s “human-friendly” name (internally called “displayname”) or the color associated with a calendar. For the purpose of explaining this feature, let’s switch to a different base example. This time we’ll synchronize calendars:
[pair my_calendars]
a = "my_calendars_local"
b = "my_calendars_remote"
collections = ["from a", "from b"]
metadata = ["color"]
[storage my_calendars_local]
type = "filesystem"
path = "~/.calendars/"
fileext = ".ics"
[storage my_calendars_remote]
type = "caldav"
url = "https://owncloud.example.com/remote.php/caldav/"
username = "bob"
password = "asdf"
Run vdirsyncer discover
for discovery. Then you can use vdirsyncer
metasync
to synchronize the color
property between your local calendars
in ~/.calendars/
and your ownCloud. Locally the color is just represented
as a file called color
within the calendar folder.
More information about collections¶
“Collection” is a collective term for addressbooks and calendars. Each
collection from a storage has a “collection name”, a unique identifier for each
collection. In the case of filesystem
-storage, this is the name of the
directory that represents the collection, in the case of the DAV-storages this
is the last segment of the URL. We use this identifier in the collections
parameter in the pair
-section.
This identifier doesn’t change even if you rename your calendar in whatever UI you have, because that only changes the so-called “displayname” property [3]. On some servers (iCloud, Google) this identifier is randomly generated and has no correlation with the displayname you chose.
[3] | Which you can also synchronize with metasync using metadata =
["displayname"] . |
There are three collection names that have a special meaning:
"from a"
,"from b"
: A placeholder for all collections that can be found on side A/B when runningvdirsyncer discover
.null
: The parameters give to the storage are exact and require no discovery.
The last one requires a bit more explanation. Assume this config which synchronizes two directories of addressbooks:
[pair foobar]
a = "foo"
b = "bar"
collections = ["from a", "from b"]
[storage foo]
type = "filesystem"
fileext = ".vcf"
path = "./contacts_foo/"
[storage bar]
type = "filesystem"
fileext = ".vcf"
path = "./contacts_bar/"
As we saw previously this will synchronize all collections in
./contacts_foo/
with each same-named collection in ./contacts_bar/
. If
there’s a collection that exists on one side but not the other, vdirsyncer will
ask whether to create that folder on the other side.
If we set collections = null
, ./contacts_foo/
and ./contacts_bar/
are no longer treated as folders with collections, but as collections
themselves. This means that ./contacts_foo/
and ./contacts_bar/
will
contain .vcf
-files, not subfolders that contain .vcf
-files.
This is useful in situations where listing all collections fails because your
DAV-server doesn’t support it, for example. In this case, you can set url
of your carddav
- or caldav
-storage to a URL that points
to your CalDAV/CardDAV collection directly.
Note that not all storages support the null
-collection, for example
google_contacts
and google_calendar
don’t.