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Part of the plan with removing all google software from my life includes hosting that same data at home, on my home server. One type of google data that’s tough to give up is the calendar. For many years, my partner and I have shared our google calendars with each other, so we can see when we’ll be out, coordinate vacations and so on. But no more! :) Today I leave google calendar for good. (I hope)

I found a new solution that seems to work great and so I am giving a try, starting today. This actually involves a set of new software (yay for nerding out on new software):

• Radicale – a CALDav server I am running on my home server. It stores the data used for my calendar in a single, centralized place.
• Thunderbird – a Calendar client app for my Linux desktop. It shows the calendar data it syncs with Radicale.
• Davx5 – a CALDav sync app I am running on my Android phone. It syncs the data with my server.
• Fossify Calendar – the calendar app on my phone. It uses the data synced by Davx5 to show me my calendar.

I know, I know – that’s a tall tech stack and if anything fails, I have no calendar. But hey, life off of goog will be worth it right?

Here were my setup steps, so you can see how easy this all was:

• Install Radicale on my server via docker

  • I used the docker-radicale image for this, which is not official, but Radicale doesn’t offer one and this was wayyy easier than setting up Radicale the normal way via Python/Pip.

• Thunderbird was already on my PC, since it comes with Ubuntu.

  • So I just went in, told it I don’t have an email, then added the Calendar from my server’s URL and boom, it works!

• I installed Davx5 and Fossify Calendar via F-Droid.

  • That’s an alternative APK source which offers all FOSS apps and is generally way better than the Goog App Store.

• I configured the connection between Davx5 and my server and told it to sync once every 30 minutes.

  • This just gets the data onto my phone.

• I configured Fossify Calendar to use that CALDav data, and to sync with my partner’s good calendar, and boom - all set!

If you want to try this yourselves, it should be about this simple. You don’t have to have a separate PC to act as the server like I do, you can use your own PC just as well. It just won’t sync with your phone unless it’s on, is the only concern there.

Onward toward a more google free life!

:)