So I finally got around to installing something so I can host my own calendar and contacts so that data is not shared with the big four corporate companies.

As I just need basic calendar and contacts functionality I chose the open source project Radicale. As I have run Fedora to control the house and my private data since 1998 I firstly installed the Radicale rpm via DNF.

dnf install radicale

This should install radicale3 as that is the latest version at the time of writing this blog post.

I will be running it off a sub domain of my public domain so I have set that up in the DNS with my main domain hosting company.

I have used a sub domain with a reverse proxy rather than opening another port [5232] on the firewall. I initially set it up with the port open but then rethought my approach as its more secure than to open the port on the firewall.

One other good thing using a sub domain is that you just need to have the proxy settings for that host rather than using location settings with the pathing.

Apache virtual host looks like this

<VirtualHost *:443>
 
 ServerName <subdomain.domain>
 DocumentRoot <pathtodomain>

 ProxyRequests Off
 ProxyPreserveHost On

 <Proxy *>
 Order deny,allow
 Allow from all
 </Proxy>

 # Forward requests to the backend Radicale server
 ProxyPass / http://localhost:5232/
 ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:5232/

 # Inform Radicale about its location behind the proxy
 RequestHeader set X-Script-Name /radicale

 SSLCertificateFile <path to public key>
 SSLCertificateKeyFile <path to private key>

</VirtualHost>

Set up the config file for radicale to use it locally running on localhost on port 5232 and I am using my dovecot server to authenticate the users.

Then you should just be able to surf to the subdomain and be presented with the login page of the radicale server. Login and add your collections for the calendars and contacts.

Then configuring all the clients should be pretty straight forward for PC, Mac, iOS and Android.