Would you kindly help me get started ?

[trya2l]

Hello,

I am new to rustical and CalDAV, and I do not understand how to create a user.

I've played with these commands

podman pull ghrc.io/lennart-k/rustical
podman run --name --rm -d -p 4000:4000 -v ./data:/var/lib/rustical:z rustical
podman exec rustical rustical principals create user

Then I've tried to enter user/user on the frontend but that didn't work out.

I also do not which url I should use to connect user to the dav.

I'm not sure it's related to #7 since I didn't see the auth option in Cargo docs. I guess a lot of things has changed since then.

Maybe some parts of the docs are already a bit outdated ? User management

Any tips would be really appreciated and helpful!

Thanks :)

[lennart-k]

Hello,
I should probably document this better in the future.
You were definitely on the right track, you just have to add the --password argument to the last command as

podman exec rustical rustical principals create user --password

You can now also do

podman exec rustical rustical principals edit user --password

Then you'll be prompted to enter a password. :)

[trya2l]

@lennart-k

Thanks a lot! I haven't looked at the code yet, so I wouldn't have known.

I have a last request, concerning the creation of a new calendar. I can't seem to get the url right.

I tried with these with no success on thunderbird:

http://localhost:4000/test
http://localhost:4000/user/test
http://localhost:4000/user/user/test
http://localhost:4000/user/user/calendar/test
http://localhost:4000/frontend/user/user/calendar/test

[lennart-k]

You want to keep the subscription url empty (that is for subscribed external calendars)
In Thunderbird you should be able to just specify http://localhost:4000, hopefully Thunderbird will auto-discover. Otherwise the URL is

http://localhost:4000/caldav/principal/user/test/

Hope that works, feel free to ask any follow-up questions that come up as that also helps a lot in improving the documentation and making the UI less confusing. :)

[trya2l]

@lennart-k
Thanks 🙏

You're right, thunderbird does try to discover but it seems there is an error.

• Error for http://localhost:4000

podman run -it --network host --rm --volume caldav:/var/lib/rustical --name caldav rustical:latest

2025-07-04T23:14:42.344052Z  INFO rustical_store_sqlite: Running database migrations
2025-07-04T23:14:42.350412Z  INFO rustical: RustiCal serving on http://0.0.0.0:4000
2025-07-04T23:14:58.372399Z  WARN http-request{otel.name=GET /frontend ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0}: tower_sessions_core::session: possibly suspicious activity: record not found in store
2025-07-04T23:15:19.158137Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PROPFIND / ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error
2025-07-04T23:15:19.161010Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PUT / ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error
2025-07-04T23:15:21.462204Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PROPFIND / ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error
2025-07-04T23:15:21.465876Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PUT / ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error

Using http://localhost:4000/caldav/principal/user/test still fails

podman run -it --network host --rm --volume caldav:/var/lib/rustical --name caldav rustical:latest

2025-07-04T23:11:49.528323Z  INFO rustical_store_sqlite: Running database migrations
2025-07-04T23:11:49.533350Z  INFO rustical: RustiCal serving on http://0.0.0.0:4000
2025-07-04T23:12:03.786668Z  WARN http-request{otel.name=GET /frontend/user ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0}: tower_sessions_core::session: possibly suspicious activity: record not found in store
2025-07-04T23:12:28.009153Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=HEAD /caldav/principal/user/test ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error
2025-07-04T23:12:30.230556Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=HEAD /caldav/principal/user/test ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error

Out of curiosity, I've also tried on v0.4.1 and it still doesn't work

podman run -it --network host --rm --volume caldav:/var/lib/rustical --name caldav rustical:0.4.1
2025-07-04T23:19:49.549833Z  INFO rustical_store_sqlite: Running database migrations
2025-07-04T23:19:49.557320Z  INFO rustical: RustiCal serving on http://0.0.0.0:4000
2025-07-04T23:20:03.522109Z  WARN http-request{otel.name=GET /frontend/user ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0}: tower_sessions_core::session: possibly suspicious activity: record not found in store
2025-07-04T23:20:24.821898Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PROPFIND / ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error
2025-07-04T23:20:24.825259Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PUT / ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error
2025-07-04T23:20:28.843451Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PROPFIND / ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error
2025-07-04T23:20:28.846472Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PUT / ua=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.12.0 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error

And between each runs I make sure to clean the volume

podman exec -it caldav rustical principals create user --password
Enter your password: (user)

Principal created

podman stop -t 0 caldav && podman volume rm caldav
caldav
caldav

I've also tried with DAVx5 and GNOME calendar, but with no success on these fronts either.

DAVx5 gives this output

podman run -it --network host --rm --volume caldav:/var/lib/rustical --name caldav rustical:0.4.1

2025-07-04T23:39:50.857256Z  INFO rustical_store_sqlite: Running database migrations
2025-07-04T23:39:50.863899Z  INFO rustical: RustiCal serving on http://0.0.0.0:4000
2025-07-04T23:40:48.832688Z  WARN http-request{otel.name=PROPFIND /calda ua=DAVx5/4.5-ose (dav4jvm; okhttp/4.12.0) Android/14 status=404 Not Found}: rustical::app: client error
2025-07-04T23:40:48.944161Z  WARN http-request{otel.name=PROPFIND /calda ua=DAVx5/4.5-ose (dav4jvm; okhttp/4.12.0) Android/14 status=404 Not Found}: rustical::app: client error

In fact, it seems to "ignore" - at least it doesn't log - any path under /caldav, that's why the only path displayed is /calda

Auto-discovery raises the same error as thunderbird.

2025-07-05T01:19:47.760590Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PROPFIND / ua=DAVx5/4.5-ose (dav4jvm; okhttp/4.12.0) Android/14 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error
2025-07-05T01:19:47.812480Z ERROR http-request{otel.name=PROPFIND / ua=DAVx5/4.5-ose (dav4jvm; okhttp/4.12.0) Android/14 status=405 Method Not Allowed}: rustical::app: client error

[lennart-k]

Thanks for your patience,
so in v0.4.10 I've now fixed the HEAD method (although I believe that's not really the cause)
I've run into similar issues when using the password instead of an app token so I hope that's the issue.
If that's the case the password is only meant to log in to the frontend and from there you can generate tokens for specific apps.
With an app token Thunderbird works for me on

http://localhost:4000

where it auto-discovers the calendars.

That should hopefully also resolve GNOME Calendar and DAVx5 (which should also be able to just take the root path and auto-discover) :)

Note that the logs might be misleading because without RUST_LOG=debug they hide unauthorized requests (That's because Apple would try an unauthorized request for every request it does so the logs would get a bit flooded.)

[trya2l]

Ok, I can't do it right now, but I'll let you know once I've tried. Thanks

[trya2l]

So I tried and you were right. All the clients are able to connect when using the app token. Thanks 🥂

[trya2l]

@lennart-k Thanks for helping me get started.

Now that everything is set up, and considering the warning displayed in the README, in which scenarios should I expect data loss?

Is backing up the container volume sufficient, or should I expect incompatibility issues between versions?

I'm happy to test the software, but ofc I'm still better safe than sorry! :)

[lennart-k]

Glad it's working now :)
So in the past I wanted to be very cautious with recommending people to use rustical in production.
That was when there were still possible errors that could go unobserved and where I enjoyed the convenience of changing the data model without migrations.
Now I've fully migrated my calendars/contacts from Nextcloud to rustical and I'm fairly confident that there should be no potential data loss anymore.
Also that means I won't do any data model changes without proper migrations.

I will also only change the data model in 0.x version changes and mention that in the release notes so for these it might generally be good practice to do a backup before.

I'm happy to test the software, but ofc I'm still better safe than sorry! :)

That's the correct mindset and why I want to have an honest disclaimer in the readme :)
It's kind of a weird position that as long as the user base is not large enough to stumble into weird edge cases I cannot really recommend to use the software in production but that obviously decreases the potential user base :D
So my current strategy is to use it productively myself and to happily fix issues for others daring to use it too :)

(That was a bit of a long answer, sorry)

[trya2l]

Nice, that was exactly the point of my question. I'm totally ok with that and I also plan to soon migrate from nextcloud to dufs/rustical.