Baikal

Baikal is a lightweight open-source CalDAV and CardDAV server that gives individuals, families, and small teams a private place to host calendars, tasks, events, and contacts. Built on top of the battle-tested sabre/dav PHP library, Baikal speaks the same standards-based protocols that iOS, macOS, Android, Thunderbird, Outlook, and dedicated clients like DAVx5 already understand — so any device that already supports calendar and contact sync can talk to a Baikal instance without custom apps or proprietary protocols. The server includes a browser-based admin interface for user management, calendar creation, and configuration, and stores data in SQLite by default for the simplest possible deployment.

Common Use Cases

Privacy-conscious individuals self-host Baikal to escape commercial calendar services that mine event metadata for advertising or recommendation graphs, keeping appointments, contacts, and task lists inside infrastructure they fully control. Families share calendars across phones, tablets, and laptops on a single Baikal instance, with each family member getting their own login plus shared "household" calendars for trips, school events, and chores. Small businesses and freelancers run Baikal as the calendar and contacts backend for staff devices, integrating with desktop clients like Thunderbird and mobile clients like Apple Calendar without paying per-seat for cloud groupware. Open-source teams use Baikal as a lightweight scheduling backend behind an existing identity system, exposing calendars to project tooling, on-call rotations, and shared address books. Tech-savvy users replace their phone's calendar sync with Baikal-backed accounts so a single self-hosted server can power scheduling on iOS, Android, and desktop simultaneously, surviving any single platform's policy or pricing changes.

Key Features

• Standards-compliant CalDAV and CardDAV server based on the well-tested sabre/dav PHP library
• Compatible with every major client — iOS Calendar and Contacts, macOS, Android (via DAVx5 and stock clients), Thunderbird Lightning, Outlook, and most third-party calendar apps
• Multi-user accounts with isolated calendars, tasks, and address books per user
• Shared calendars and shared address books for team scheduling, family coordination, and group contacts
• Built-in admin web UI for user management, calendar creation, and server configuration without editing files manually
• SQLite-backed default storage for a single-container deployment, with optional MySQL for larger or multi-instance setups
• Public, hidden, and read-only collections for sharing read-only schedules or making selected calendars discoverable
• Server-side recurring events, exceptions, and reminders fully synced across all clients
• Subscription-style ICS exports for one-way feeds into external systems like Apple Calendar or Google Calendar
• Authentication via per-user usernames and passwords with the option to integrate with reverse-proxy auth where appropriate
• Lightweight PHP + nginx footprint that comfortably runs on small VPS plans alongside other self-hosted services
• Active community of maintainers and a long, stable release history rooted in a widely-deployed standards library

Why deploy Baikal on Hostinger VPS

Running Baikal on a Hostinger VPS gives you a private, fully owned calendar and contacts server that keeps highly personal data — appointments, family schedules, work events, customer contacts — inside infrastructure you control instead of a SaaS calendar provider. Calendar metadata reveals more than most users realise, so self-hosting is a meaningful privacy upgrade for anyone uncomfortable with that data feeding a third-party recommendation graph. Because Baikal runs as a single PHP container backed by SQLite, the resource footprint stays tiny and persists cleanly through container restarts via two named volumes. Combined with Traefik-based HTTPS routing on a clean branded hostname, the CalDAV and CardDAV URLs you paste into iOS, Android, Thunderbird, and Outlook are TLS-encrypted end-to-end. And because Baikal speaks the standard protocols every major client already supports, switching off a public calendar service to Baikal is mostly a configuration change on each device rather than a migration project.