Tutorial

Before starting, consider if you actually need vdirsyncer. There are better alternatives available for particular usecases.

Installation

Unless you want to contribute to vdirsyncer, you should use the packages from your distribution:

If there is no package for your distribution, you’ll need to install vdirsyncer manually. There is an easy command to copy-and-paste for this as well, but you should be aware of its consequences.

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 for type = caldav and fileext = .vcf for fileext = .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 default addressbook to ~/.contacts/:

[pair my_contacts]
a = my_contacts_local
b = my_contacts_remote
collections = null

[storage my_contacts_local]
type = filesystem
path = ~/.contacts/
fileext = .vcf

[storage my_contacts_remote]
type = carddav
url = https://owncloud.example.com/remote.php/carddav/addressbooks/bob/default/
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 a bunch of .vcf files which all contain a contact in VCARD format each. You can modify their content, 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.

[1]You’ll want to use a helper program for this.

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.

Collection discovery

The above configuration only syncs a single addressbook. This is denoted by collections = null (collection = addressbook/calendar). We can change this line to let vdirsyncer automatically sync all addressbooks it can find:

[pair my_contacts]
a = my_contacts_local
b = my_contacts_remote
collections = ["from a", "from b"]  # changed from `null`

[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

With the above configuration, vdirsyncer discover will fetch all available collections from the server, and create subdirectories for each of them in ~/.contacts/ after confirmation. For example, ownCloud’s default addressbook "default" would be synchronized to the location ~/.contacts/default/.

After that, vdirsyncer sync will synchronize all your addressbooks as expected. 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.

[2]Because collections are added rarely, and checking for this case before every synchronization isn’t worth the overhead.

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.