Calendar / CalDAV

Invitations

Nextcloud can send invitations for event attendees if this option is activated. Be sure to have configured the email server first so that the invitations go through. See Email.

You must also make sure the “Send invitations to attendees” setting is activated in the admin setting groupware section for the emails to be sent.

Birthday calendar

Contacts that have a birthday date filled are automatically added as events to a special Birthday calendar. If you deactivate this option, all users will no longer have this calendar.

When activating this option, users birthday calendars won’t be available right away because they need to be generated by a background task. See Using the occ command section DAV commands.

Reminder notifications

Nextcloud handles sending notifications for events.

Nextcloud currently handles two types of reminder notifications: Build-in Nextcloud notifications and email notifications. For the emails to be send, you’ll need a configured email server. See Email.

Make sure the “Send notifications for events” and the “Enable notifications for events via push” are activated in the admin setting groupware section for this feature to work.

Background jobs

Running background jobs can be an expensive task when there are a large number of events, reminders, event sharees and attendees. However, this needs to happen often enough so that the notifications are sent on time. To accomplish this you should use a dedicated occ command that runs more often than the standard cron system:

# crontab -u www-data -e
*/5 * * * * php -f /var/www/nextcloud/occ dav:send-event-reminders

See Using the occ command section Dav commands.

You’ll also need to change the sending mode from background-job to occ:

php occ config:app:set dav sendEventRemindersMode --value occ

If you don’t use this dedicated command, the reminders will just be sent as soon as possible when the background jobs run.

FreeBusy

When logged-in, Nextcloud can return FreeBusy information for all users of the instance, to know when they are available so that you can schedule an event at the right time. If you don’t wish for users to have this capability, you can disable FreeBusy for the whole instance with the following setting:

php occ config:app:set dav disableFreeBusy --value yes

Subscriptions

Refresh rate

Calendar subscriptions are cached on server and refreshed periodically. The default refresh rate is one week, unless the subscription itself tells otherwise.

To set up a different default refresh rate, change the calendarSubscriptionRefreshRate option:

php occ config:app:set dav calendarSubscriptionRefreshRate --value "P1D"

Where the value is a DateInterval, for instance with the above command all of the Nextcloud instance’s calendars would be refreshed every day.

Allow subscriptions on local network

Because of security issues, Nextcloud forbids subscriptions from local network hosts. If you need to allow this, change the following parameter to:

php occ config:app:set dav webcalAllowLocalAccess --value yes

Trash bin

Nextcloud supports a calendar, events and tasks trash bin.

The default delay before objects are purged from the trash bin is 30 days. A background job runs every 6 hours to clean up expired objects.

To set up a different retention period, change the calendarRetentionObligation option:

php occ config:app:set dav calendarRetentionObligation --value=2592000

Where the value is the number of seconds for the period. Setting the value to 0 disables the trash bin.

Resources and rooms

The Nextcloud CalDAV back end support resources and rooms. Resources and room can be booked for appointments and the system will schedule them so they can only be used once at a time. Those resources and rooms have to be provided by an app that provides a back end for this.

Once a back end app is installed the app typically allows admins or even users to define the resources, but this is subject of the specific implementation.

Nextcloud periodically queries all registered back ends. Therefore new and updated resources and rooms will show with a delay.

Known back ends