How to set up the Baikal CardDav and CalDAV server with nginx on Debian

Baikal is a lightweight CardDav and CalDAV server. It is written in PHP and supports SQLite + MySQL, which enables it to run on almost any webspace.

However, you might want to have your calendar and contacts on your own dedicated server, for no one else to see. If you use nginx as a webserver this might be difficult to set up, besides that there is almost no documentation available and files like example configs are missing in the download from baikal-server.com .

Setting up nginx

First, set up nginx with PHP like described here. Then install php5-sqlite and sqlite.
apt-get install sqlite3 sqlite php5-sqlite

Add a VirtualHost file for nginx:
nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com

Insert the following:
server {
server_name yourdomain.com;

root /var/www/yourdomain.com;
index index.php;

charset utf-8;
location ~ /(\.ht|Core|Specific) {
deny all;
return 404;
}
location ~ ^(.+\.php)(.*) {
try_files $fastcgi_script_name =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
include fastcgi_params;
}

}

Set a symlink in sites-enabled and restart nginx:
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
ln -s ../sites-available/yourdomain.com
/etc/init.d/nginx restart

Installing Baikal

Download baikal from baikal-server.com (I used the “FTP version”) with “wget” and unpack it with “unzip” in your web folder (/var/www/yourdomain.com), then browse to the location and follow the installation instructions. It will nag about missing rights and you can either fix it manually or use the easy method with:
chmod -R 770 /var/www/yourdomain.com

In the web interface, create a new user and add a new calendar (or use the default one).

Configuring your client

If Thunderbird is your mail client, install the Lightning add-on.
Go to File (press ALT) -> New -> Calendar

Then add the URL to your calendar in the following format:

http://yourdomain.com/cal.php/calendars/username/calendarname

The default calendar name is “default”.

An Address Book add-on for Thunderbird is SOGo Connector

Different clients require different URLS, for example:

CalDav:
http://yourdomain.com/cal.php/principals/username (Apple iCal, Apple Calendar)

http://yourdomain.com/cal.php/calendars/username/calendarname

CardDAV:

http://yourdomain.com/card.php/addressbooks/username/addressbookname

yourdomain.com/card.php (Apple Contacts)

Downloading your calendar and contacts

This should be possible in your browser by appending “?export” to the URL (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/cal.php/calendars/yourusername/calendarname?export ). However, this returns the following for me:
Calendar with name 'calendar?export' could not be found

The solution, that I only tested with CalDAV, is to add the following line to the file named cal.php in the plugins section:
$server->addPlugin(new \Sabre\CalDAV\ICSExportPlugin());

After doing that I successfully downloaded my calendar.

Upgrading Baikal to a newer version

1. Back up your SQLite database, which is located in the “Specific” folder.
2. Download the new version, unpack it and replace the “Specific” folder with the one from the old version
3. Open Baikal admin in your browser to get to the upgrade wizard

All this took quite a while to figure out, maybe this posts will help someone else. It will certainly help me next time I set it up. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.