It's a simple utility for taking your Fastmail contacts and generating a birthday calendar from them. This is a feature that's supported natively by Fastmail, but the native feature has no ability to filter for specific contacts (e.g. the ones you have starred), so you either see the birthday of EVERY SINGLE PERSON YOU HAVE EVER MET, or nobody. Personally, I don't need to be reminded every year about my third grade math teacher whose birthday is in the contacts database for some reason, but I also don't want to delete data just for the sake of not having it show up on a calendar.
Hence, a very simple cron job that just grabs the contacts database, parses out only the contacts that are starred, and creates a calendar out of them. For both of the download and upload tasks, the existing tool pimsync is used because there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
Install pimsync.
Clone the repo and create .env file in it:
CALDAV_URL=
CALDAV_USERNAME=
CALDAV_PASSWORD=
CARDDAV_URL=
CARDDAV_USERNAME=
CARDDAV_PASSWORD=
BIRTHDAY_CALENDAR_ID=
The URL, username, and password are your CalDAV and CardDAV connection details. If you have generated an access token that will work for both protocols, feel free to use it for both.
- Fastmail is straightforward: documentation
- Google has something with OAuth2...? You can try figuring it out if
you want.
- I have hardcoded CardDAV details for how Fastmail handles the VIPs (starred) collection, this might need updating if you use with non-Fastmail source...
The last parameter is your calendar/collection ID that will be fully overwritten and populated with birthdays from the starred contacts. You identify calendars using their CalDAV IDs, not using their display names. On Fastmail for example, these are UUIDs and you can find them by clicking "export" next to a calendar in the settings and noting the UUID in the URL.
Install dependencies with Poetry or
equivalent following the versions in pyproject.toml, poetry.lock.
Execute
poetry run python -m birthday_filter
on a cron job with the desired frequency. Your events should show up automatically in the target calendar you specified.