Syncing with read-only storages

If you want to subscribe to a public, read-only WebCAL-calendar but neither your server nor your calendar apps support that (or support it insufficiently), vdirsyncer can be used to synchronize such a public calendar A with a new calendar B of your own and keep B updated.

Step 1: Create the target calendar

First you need to create the calendar you want to sync the WebCAL-calendar with. Most servers offer a web interface for this. You then need to note the CalDAV URL of your calendar. Note that this URL should directly point to the calendar you just created, which means you would have one such URL for each calendar you have.

Step 2: Creating the config

Paste this into your vdirsyncer config:

[pair holidays]
a = "holidays_public"
b = "holidays_private"
collections = null

[storage holidays_public]
type = "http"
# The URL to your iCalendar file.
url = ...

[storage holidays_private]
type = "caldav"
# The direct URL to your calendar.
url = ...
# The credentials to your CalDAV server
username = ...
password = ...

Then run vdirsyncer discover holidays and vdirsyncer sync holidays, and your previously created calendar should be filled with events.

Step 3: The partial_sync parameter

New in version 0.14.

You may get into a situation where you want to hide or modify some events from your holidays calendar. If you try to do that at this point, you’ll notice that vdirsyncer will revert any changes you’ve made after a few times of running sync. This is because vdirsyncer wants to keep everything in sync, and it can’t synchronize changes to the public holidays-calendar because it doesn’t have the rights to do so.

For such purposes you can set the partial_sync parameter to ignore:

[pair holidays]
a = "holidays_public"
b = "holidays_private"
collections = null
partial_sync = ignore

See the config docs for more information.