Transitioning from Nextcloud to Baikal on FreeBSD

After wrestling with Nextcloud trying to upgrade after a long time, I gave up and decided it was time to switch to a simpler and more robust caldav/carddav server. A Web UI would be nice, but that'll have to wait.

Installing Baikal

Surprisingly, FreeBSD has packages for baikal, so I just installed baikal-php85 and it landed in /usr/local/www/baikal. Afterward, it was a matter of following the installation instructions to get it running. The only thing I had to do for my setup was to add a dns alias record on my OPNSense firewall for the dav host to point to my server and restart nginx and php-fpm, set permissions, and all was well.

Exporting Nextcloud data

This was the most important part. A generous and very smart soul has written a backup utility for Nextcloud {Cal,Card}dav server named calcardbackup. It worked flawlessly. Cloned the repo under /usr/local/www where nextcloud lived as well, changed permissions accordiing to the quick installation guide and ran it without issues. I love it when software just works!

Moving to Baikal

Thunderbird supports networked calendars, so after adding http://my.domain/http/dav.php as the host and logging in (File -> New -> Calendar -> On the Network), I was able to preview and import each calendar .ics file and viola! I could see the events uploading on the Baikal web admin interface as well.