I’m trying to de-Google my life and self-host more. One tricky point with me is calendaring. I can get a CalDav server running and syncing with my Android phone without much hassle, but I haven’t yet found a server or client that can send e-mail reminders for events, rather than just pop-up notifications.
I’ve been told to try Nextcloud. I tried installing it but it’s overkill for me, and I don’t want to deal with setting up a domain. Surely there can’t be exactly one CalDav option that can send email reminders. But I’ve never heard anyone say anything other than “Nextcloud.”
Well I may be missing something about how Nextcloud works because I never really fully got it set up. Once I got Nextcloud set up on my domain, how would I go about getting my domain pointed to a Tailscale address?
You don’t need to get it set up with your domain. All you need is the IP address of the machine it’s running on; either local or Tailscale address. Just type it into the browser URL bar. I.e. http://192.168.0.1:8080/ is a valid URL.
Now, obviously you’d want to have the ability to do things like type a human readable domain name and have SSL certificates but they’re not technically necessary. Until I found the time to set up my reverse proxy, I used my Paperless using a bookmark to the IP address and port.
Pointing your domain at a Tailscale address is pretty simple, you just need to add an A record wherever your domain’s DNS zone is configured which points at the IP address (e.g. 100.107.42.69).
Personally I run Pi-hole as a DNS server, and add the domain as a custom DNS entry. Then in the Tailscale settings, you can set the DNS server (there is a Tailscale help page for setting up Pi-hole with Tailscale).
Oh, isn’t that interesting. I already run a Pi-Hole but I had never thought of doing that with a custom entry. I suppose that would work, wouldn’t it?
I really dislike that everything in this thread is pushing towards Nextcloud after all. It seems like it should be easier to get email reminders. It should really be somewhere in-between “use Google” and “run Nextcloud and buy a domain name and use a custom piece of hardware to run your own DNS server to which you have to add even more customizations to be able to run and sync the Nextcloud suite, most of which you’ll never use.”
I’d guess it’s not that the solution doesn’t exist, but that Nextcloud is one of the most popular self-hosted service. since so many people are already using it, it’s all they know of.