FBX comes with a fantastic caldav / carddav server: radicale.
I’ve been doing some online searching and as there are various mobile / pc clients for caldav/carddav, I’ve found no viable solutions for a foss web-client (apart from InfCloud that comes with an outdated ux not adaptive to mobile screens).
Roundcube has a variety of third party plugins. One popular among them (specifically for carddav) is the roundcube/carddav plugin. With this, I have been able to integrate my radicale address-books into roundcube and have been able to view, edit contacts and use it to pick recipients for my mail.
Please note that this plugin is not a part of the Debian repo and is a third party plugin developed for roundcube. Although it seems to work, I have not fully tested it and do not know the outcomes it may introduce to your FBX. So, make sure to read the documentation in the plugins git repo and feel free to follow this post at your own risk.
Below, I’m sharing the steps I followed to get the carddav plugin working with roundcube.
FBX Version: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) and FreedomBox version 24.5
STEP 1: Be sure to log out of all roundcube instances. Download and extract the plugin from its repository into the FBX roundcube plugins folder.
The below commands are for the latest release from the plugin repo. Please revise the version number to what’s relevant and take care to download only the precompiled .tar.gz (not source code).
cd /usr/share/roundcube/plugins
sudo wget https://github.com/mstilkerich/rcmcarddav/releases/download/v5.1.0/carddav-v5.1.0.tar.gz
sudo tar -xzvf carddav-v5.1.0.tar.gz
sudo rm carddav-v5.1.0.tar.gz
STEP 2: Create a valid copy of the default configuration file. There is no need to make any changes to the default configuration, it works as is.
cd /usr/share/roundcube/plugins/carddav
sudo cp config.inc.php.dist config.inc.php
STEP 3: Create a symbolic link to the plugins folder at /var/lib/roundcube/plugins
sudo ln -s /usr/share/roundcube/plugins/carddav/ /var/lib/roundcube/plugins/carddav
STEP 4: Edit the roundcube configuration file with sudo nano /var/lib/roundcube/config/config.inc.php
and add carddav
to active plugins as shown below:
// List of active plugins (in plugins/ directory)
// Debian: install roundcube-plugins first to have any
$config['plugins'] = [
'carddav',
// 'archive',
// 'zipdownload',
];
STEP 5: Login to roundcube and go to settings where you should find
CardDAV
in the list. Select it and hit add
from the upper right hand menu. Provide a name for your account (i.e. radicale, freedombox, etc) and write down your radicale url (i.e. https://myfreedombox.com/radicale/myuser
) with your FBX credentials. Other default values seem as they should be so no need to change anything.
Once you hit save, roundcube will sync with your carddav server and bring up all your addressbooks. The initial sync takes a little time depending on the amount of data you have but once it’s done, it works pretty well.
Good luck!