Category: Android

Sync your Android contacts and calendars with your own server

It’s 2012, and there are still people who don’t put all their information onto Google/Facebook/… servers. Call them paranoid control freaks, if you want. 😉

Some of them even run their own e-mail server. Those people would probably prefer to have their address book(s) and calendar(s) stored on their own server as well, which Android cannot do out of the box.

This blog post aims to give a brief overview over my current solution to this problem. It’s not 100% perfect yet, but I am quite satisfied with it already. I have been using this setup for a couple of months now, and did not encounter any problems of relevance. (*)

Software components involved

On the server:

  • DAViCal – a free (GPL licensed) CalDAV/CardDAV server written in PHP; needs PostgreSQL as database server
  • Roundcube Webmail with the CardDAV plugin – to manage your contacts from within any web browser (Roundcube is of course also a decent mail client)

On the desktop / laptop computer:

  • Mozilla Thunderbird with
    • Lightning extension – to manage your calendar(s) from your Linux/Windows/Mac computer
    • SOGo connector extension (this link brings you to a file listing where you can download a nightly snapshot, there is no officially released version for current Thunderbird versions on the SOGo download page, yet) – to manage / lookup your contacts from your Linux/Windows/Mac computer

      A few words on how to get the SOGo connector working (it’s not really straight-forward, in my opinion): After installing the extension by dragging the downloaded .xpi file onto Thunderbird, open the Address book and choose Menu File / New / Remote Address Book. Enter the URL of your DAViCal CardDAV collection, i.e. https://your.server/davical/caldav.php/YOUR_USER/YOUR_COLLECTION. Then right-click on the new address book and choose Synchronize.

On the Android device:

  • CalDAV-Sync app from Market or AndroidPIT for a bit more than 2€

    (Since CalDAV-Sync is just a backend app that facilitates syncing, this is a screenshot of the Android calendar, with the event that can be seen in the Thunderbird-Lightning screenshot above)
  • CardDAV-Sync app from Market or AndroidPIT for a bit less than 1.50€ or free

    (Since CardDAV-Sync is just a backend app that facilitates syncing, this is a screenshot of the Android contact viewer, with the contact that can be seen in the Roundcube CardDAV screenshot above)
  • Contact Editor or Contact Editor Pro app from Market or AndroidPIT (Pro costs a bit more than 2€, the free version lacks a few features)

A few notes regarding the components:

  • Contact Editor is necessary because the default Android contact editor somehow does not work with custom contact sources. It integrates seamlessly once you have set it as default action upon adding/editing a contact for the first time after installation.
  • The SOGo connector extension for Thunderbird is a good start, but in the long run I really hope Thunderbird’s contact handling can be brought to a level that matches the rest of the application. There is hope.
  • There seems to be a calendar plugin for Roundcube as well (as part of the MyRoundcube plugin collection), and it seems to support CalDAV, but I couldn’t get it to work so far (and did not try hard, since I always have a Thunderbird with Lightning around, which is great for calendaring).

I’m planning to write more on how to get everything set up, but I currently don’t have time for that. The hardest part is getting DAViCal and PostgreSQL to work, in my opinion, all the other components basically just need a URL (to the previously set up DAViCal collection – e.g. https://your.server/davical/caldav.php/YOUR_USER/YOUR_COLLECTION), username and password to work.

Update (2012-01-28): Added some screenshots.
By the way, what must be a very recent change in Gentoo’s packaging of PHP causes CalDAV-Sync to fail syncing, and the apache error log contains “[Sat Jan 28 08:30:48 2012] [error] [client x.x.x.x] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function cal_days_in_month() in /…/davical/inc/RRule-v2.php on line 906” if you do not enable the ‘calendar’ USE flag for dev-lang/php (which is disabled by default).
Update (2012-01-29): (*) Typical, I write about something, and then it breaks. It seems there is an incompatibility between the newly released DAViCal 1.0.2 and CalDAV-Sync. The CalDAV-Sync developer has confirmed the issue and is working on it.
Update (2012-01-30): The incompatibility – resulting in logged error messages – does not affect functionality (it was just me having set the account to “One-Way-Sync”)
Update (2012-02-09): Great news: There are nightly builds of the SOGo connector Thunderbird extension that provides CardDAV integration for Thunderbird 10 now – I knew that extension before, but development seemed to have stopped at Thunderbird 3.5 or so. I added links and a bit of info above.
Update (2012-02-09/2): I found the first bug with SOGo connector – when saving a contact that has an image, the image gets lost. This doesn’t really matter to me, because I don’t use images in contacts usually, but for people who use images, this could be annoying. Hope they fix it.

Reading news the way I like it

I have been using Tiny Tiny RSS (or TT-RSS) (www-apps/tt-rss in Gentoo) as my news aggregator since the end of 2008. It is a web application (written in PHP) that provides a great news aggregator UI. Since it’s a web application, you can use it from anywhere with just a browser, and thus have all your feeds in the same state (read/starred/…), anywhere you are. Think of it as Google Reader, but without Google knowing exactly what news articles you’re interested in, since you can run TT-RSS on your own server / web host.
So, TT-RSS alone was great already, but the UI is more suitable for when you have a mouse and a big browser window, than for using it from your phone.

Recently I discovered the Android App TT-RSS Reader which solves exactly that problem. It connects to your TT-RSS instance via an API, and brings all your feeds, with all their states just as on the web interface, to your Android device. The interface is specifically designed for touch screens, so it’s much easier to navigate through your feeds and articles than via the web interface. Furthermore, it can cache articles and images, which you can trigger while on WiFi before leaving the house, and then read everything on the way in Offline mode, to save mobile traffic, which is expensive and/or slow for some. When you’re back on WiFi, you switch back to Online mode, and TT-RSS Reader synchronises your state to your TT-RSS instance. Absolutely awesome 🙂

A couple of quick screenshots from the web interface (TT-RSS):


… and the Android App (TT-RSS Reader):


Update (2011-07-03): Shortly after posting this, hwoarang offered to take TT-RSS from the Sunrise Overlay into Gentoo’s main repository (Portage), with me proxy-maintaining it. So now it’s even easier to get TT-RSS onto your Gentoo-powered server.

My phone’s bash.profile

Here is some automation that I put into my bash.profile. It’s all done with aliases, since with regular shell scripts, I would first have to remount /mnt/sdcard without ‘noexec’. Like this, I just need to open a ConnectBot “Local” connection, type the alias, and press enter(*).

(*) For this to work, the ‘post login automation’ entry of the ConnectBot “Local” profile needs to have
bash --rcfile /sdcard/bash.profile
in it.

Here is what I have in there:

alias bb="busybox"
alias top="bb top"
alias df="bb df"

alias ll="ls -l"
alias n="su -c \"netstat -ntupl\""

alias backupdata="su -c \"rsync -rP --delete --numeric-ids --chmod=u+rwX --exclude Music /sdcard/ pat@192.168.0.2:/data/pat/g2sd/\""

alias postflash="echo \"Mounting /system read-write\" && su -c \"mount -o rw,remount /system\" && echo \"Copying modified keyboard layout files...\" && su -c \"cp /sdcard/vision-keypad-wwe.kcm.bin /system/usr/keychars/\" && su -c \"cp /sdcard/vision-keypad-wwe.kl /system/usr/keylayout/\" && echo \"Deleting awful camera click sound...\" && su -c \"rm /system/media/audio/ui/camera_click.ogg\" && sync && echo \"All done. Please reboot now.\""

clear
uptime
echo

The first couple of aliases should be self-explanatory.
backupdata is, as the name suggests, to get my SD card’s content to my home server.
postflash is for after flashing a new ROM (usually a CyanogenMod nightly build). It gets my modified keyboard layout into place, and deletes the terrible sound file that gets played when I take a photo with the phone’s camera.