Sync private iCloud calendar with MagicMirror

Sammie1232

@Beh I followed your instruction step-by step but I can’t find the .vdirsyncer/config. I get the same error as @bgz. Do you know the solution to this problem? I tried creating the vdirsyncer folder but i got the message “Access denied”.

Beh

@Sammie1232 Seems like the folder and/or the file do not exist. Please create them if they are not there.

The folder needs to be owned by the current user. On a Raspi, this command would look like this: chown -R pi:pi /home/pi/.vdirsyncer

htilburgs

You can make a iCloud Family Calendr ‘public’ by following the next steps:

On an iPhone

Go to Calendar app
At the bottom you see ‘calendar’
click on it
click on the ‘i’ behind the family calendar
go to the bottom and make sure ‘public calendar’ is selected
select option ‘share’ and then select copy
Now you have the public url and can use

On a Mac

open calendar app
select the family calendar on the left
right click on the ‘wifi’ symbol
select settings for sharing
select public calendar and you can copy the url

Beh

@htilburgs This is exactly what I‘m trying to prevent/workaround with this tutorial.
Using a public calendar URL allows anyone to see your calendars without any authentication at all. This way your calendars are open and accessible by anyone who knows the URL. (URLs can be crawled by machines ;))

This here is just a secure method to sync your calendars.

If you don‘t care about having your personal life available to anyone or anything, it‘s your business.

bachoo786

@Beh thanks for this. everything is working fine for me just a small error I wanted to ask about in my /home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-error.log, it complains the following:

ERROR! Could not find main module js file for calendars

Its not a show stopper but because the calendars folder is created in the modules folder this is why it is asking for a js file.

thisistheplace

Hey, I hope someone can help.

Everything is running fine, except my reminders.

No matter I put item_types = [“VEVENT”] or item_types = [“VEVENT”, “VTODO”] in the config, it discovers everytime a collection named tasks “Erinnerungen” (which is reminders in german) but the tasks.ics is completely empty…

Does anybody have a running configuration for icloud reminders?

Since MMM-iCloud-Client seems not working anymore I’m also interested in fetching iCloud Birthdays.

bartzzz

This post is deleted!

yk

Having an issue with daylight savings. Could this be vidirsyncer?

https://forum.magicmirror.builders/topic/11538/default-calendar-daylight-savings-issue

mdefrancesco

So i’m not sure if anyone is still watching this thread but I’ve been banging my head against the wall trying to sync. The tutorial is awesome and clearly there was a ton of work put in, so I don’t ask questions lightly.

I followed the directions to the letter but i can’t seem to control the sync. one time it took 2.5 mins and the next time it took 9 mins.

here is my timer…
GNU nano 2.7.4 File: /etc/systemd/user/vdirsyncer.timer

[Unit]
Description=Synchronize vdirs

[Timer]
OnBootSec=1m
OnUnitActiveSec=1m
AccuracySec=1m

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

that’s the only thing i have changed. it’s like i can’t get the sync to activate.
I have maybe 5 different modules running but nothing crazy (weather, clock, jeopardy, etc)

if i manually vdirsyncer sync and then reload the mirror AWESOME, no problems. just cant get the damn timer to work

any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated…I’m still new to all this so thanks

Beh

@mdefrancesco Sorry for the late reply.

Hmm… that’ weird. Did you get it working by now?

If not:
Did you use the --user flag when activating the timer? And what does systemctl --user status vdirsyncer.timer say?
And did you try different times in the timer file? I could imagine that setting everything to 1 minute could cause problems…

cagey

@Beh first and foremost, thank you very much for setting out clear and detailed instructions. I’m a complete newbie but by following your instructions it works perfectly.

I saw that, when I run “vdircyncer discover”, I receive a list of all my calenders and, in addition, my iCloud reminders. The reminders seem to have similar UUIDs to the calendars.

I tried following the same process for my “Family” reminders by creating a CALDAV sync (in the vdirsyncer config file) called “pair iCloudTD_to_MagicMirrorTD”, including the Family UUID in the “collections” section and creating a %.ics file in /MagicMirror/modules/calendars/%s.ics. I have items_types as “VEVENT”, “VTODO”.

I also inserted the %.ics file as a calendar entry in the “calendar” module in MagicMirror.

However, the to do list does not appear in MM (it just says “No upcoming events”). The calendar however works perfectly.

I’m guessing it’s not possible to import iCloud reminders in the same way as iCloud calendars but I thought I’d ask before I spend more time reading through the vdirsyncer documentation and other Google searches.

Is there a config setting I’m missing or is it not possible at all? I’m struggling to understand the difference between VTODO and reminders.

thisistheplace

@cagey I tried that too and asked for help in september last year.

Somewhere in this thread @Beh said it should work with “VTODO” but the ics files are empty after syncing. Thats why nothing is shown in your calendar.

Would be really happy to have the icloud reminders on my mirror.

elliot1996

@Beh Hey, great tutorial! Im having the same issues as above, timers just not working. Followed your troubleshooting, still no luck, just says ; Unit vdirsyncer.timer could not be found.

Even though I can see it does exists and its editable in nano

Any ideas?

elliot1996

This post is deleted!

Beh

@thisistheplace I never tried syncing VTODO. All I can do here, is to refer to the vdirsyncer docs regarding this topic: https://vdirsyncer.pimutils.org/en/stable/config.html?highlight=VEVENT#storage-caldav

Unfortunately you have to dig into that yourself, my time is very limted currently…

Beh

@elliot1996 I would need more information to help you debug this. Are you sure you used the right directory for the file? And you used the --user option when executing systemctl?

Everything you need to know about systemd unit files is here: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.unit.html

The file must be in one of the directories mentioned at the top of the page.

elliot1996

@Beh I’m sure I have installed it in the right directory, I followed :curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer/master/contrib/vdirsyncer.timer | sudo tee /etc/systemd/user/vdirsyncer.timer firstly under the MagicMirror Directory. Then activating using systemctl --user enable vdirsyncer.timer.

When looking at the status I get : Warning: The unit file, source configuration file or drop-ins of vdirsyncer.timer changed on disk. Run ‘systemctl --user daemon-reload’ to rel
● vdirsyncer.timer - Synchronize vdirs
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/user/vdirsyncer.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Drop-In: /home/smartm/.config/systemd/user/vdirsyncer.timer.d
└─override.conf
Active: inactive (dead)
Trigger: n/a

Apr 13 18:38:50 smartm-Latitude-E6230 systemd[915]: /home/smartm/.config/systemd/user/vdirsyncer.timer.d/override.conf:1: Assignment outside o
Apr 13 18:38:50 smartm-Latitude-E6230 systemd[915]: /home/smartm/.config/systemd/user/vdirsyncer.timer.d/override.conf:2: Assignment outside o
Apr 13 18:46:21 smartm-Latitude-E6230 systemd[915]: /home/smartm/.config/systemd/user/vdirsyncer.timer.d/override.conf:1: Assignment outside o
Apr 13 18:46:21 smartm-Latitude-E6230 systemd[915]: /home/smartm/.config/systemd/user/vdirsyncer.timer.d/override.conf:2: Assignment outside o
lines 1-12/12 (END)

Anything you could do to help would be amazing! Been trying to get it going all day, my mirrors close to perfect!

ShoeBox

@Beh this is a great tutorial. Thanks!

Jaunney

@Beh

Hi!

Thank you for your great solution. All went well till I tried to sync more than one iCloud Calendars.
Something is getting confused I think.
Could you please make an example for the right syntax in the following section:
collections = [“UUID1”, “UUID2”, “UUID3”]
Something like this?

I also have now problems to sync two non-iCloud Calenders after the great confusion…
My module (I use MMM-CalendarExt2) only shows one iCloud-calendar.

Thanks for your help.

BEst regards

Jaunney

duxnobis

Hi. Try to participate as well :-). I am totally new to the Raspberry world and so to MM. I have set up using the step-by-step guide. Thanks for this a lot. Now that I have set this up as expected, the result is not as expected. The other modules work well. Also 3rd party ones. But the calendar says “No upcoming event”. I have managed to obtain the according icloud calendar ID for my PRIVATE calendar. Any idea what I could potentially have wrongly set up or installed?

● vdirsyncer.timer - Synchronize vdirs
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/user/vdirsyncer.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead)
Trigger: n/a

pi@raspberrypi:~/.vdirsyncer $ vdirsyncer discover
Discovering collections for pair iCloud_to_MagicMirror
Mirror:

“14Exxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxEF2”
iCloud:
“14Exxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxEF2” (“Patrick”)
“73Fxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxB3F” (“Kalender”)
“tasks” (“Erinnerungen”)
“fc79xxxdf28cxxxxxxxxx42c0dxxxx7d6e3cf0xxxxxxcac0b2e4xxxxxxxxx” (“Peter”)
Saved for iCloud_to_MagicMirror: collections = [“14Exxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxEF2”]

config file:

CALDAV Sync

[pair iCloud_to_MagicMirror]
a = “Mirror”
b = “iCloud”
collections = [“14Exxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxEF2”]

Calendars also have a color property

metadata = [“displayname”, “color”]

[storage Mirror]

We need a single .ics file for use with the mirror (Attention! This is really slow on big amounts of events.)

type = “singlefile”

We’ll put the calendar file to a readable location for the calendar module

path = “/home/pi/MagicMirror/modules/calendars/%s.ics”

[storage iCloud]
type = “caldav”
url = “https://caldav.icloud.com/”

Authentication credentials

username = “xxxxxxxxxxx@mailprovider.com”
password = “xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx”

We only want to sync in the direction TO the mirror, so we make iCloud readonly

read_only = true

We only want to sync events

item_types = [“VEVENT”]

Can anyone of you help? Maybe you see what I did wrong or you know how I could check some points to see if I did something wrong.

Thanks for your inputs. Keep in mind, I am new in this ;-)
Patrick