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A CardDAV based address book tool

Project description

About

pyCardDAV is a simple to use CardDAV CLI client. It has built in support for mutt’s query_command but also works very well solo.

pyCardDAV consists of pycardsyncer, a program for syncing your CardDAV resource into a local database and of pc_query, a program for querying the local database. pyCardDAV is some ugly python code (actually, it’s not that bad anymore…) that holds together vobject, lxml, requests and pysqlite.

Features

(or rather: limitations)

  • pyCardDAV can only use one address book resource at the moment

  • pyCardDAV is only tested against davical, owncloud and sabredav

  • pyCardDAV can import the sender’s address directly from mutt

  • pyCardDAV can backup and import to/from .vcf files

  • pyCardDAV can add email addresses directly from mutt

  • pyCardDAV only understands VCard 3.0

  • pyCardDAV is not python 3 compatible yet

Installation

You can download pyCardDAV either from the above download link or check it out at github. Install pyCardDAV by executing python setup.py install

Copy and edit the supplied pycard.conf.sample file (default location is ~/.pycard/pycard.conf). If you don’t want to store the password in clear text in the config file, pyCardDAV will ask for it while syncing.

Make sure you have sqlite3 (normally available by default), vobject, lxml(>2), requests (>0.10), urwid (>0.9) installed. Users of python 2.6 will also need to install argparse.

pyCardDAV has so far been successfully tested on recent versions of FreeBSD, NetBSD, Debian and Ubuntu with python 2.6 and 2.7 and against davical 0.9.9.4 - 1.0.1 (later versions should be ok, too, but 0.9.9.3 and earlier don’t seem to work), owncloud and sabredav.

Usage

pyCardDAV consists of three scripts, pycardsyncr which is used to sync the local database with the server, pc_query to interact with the local database and pycard-import to import email addresses from mutt.

Execute pycardsyncer to sync your addresses to the local database. You can test pc_query with:

% pc_query searchstring

By default pyCardDAV only prints the names, email addresses and telephone numbers of contacts matching the search string, to see all vCard properties use the “-a” option.

For usage with mutt etc., pyCardDAV can also print only email addresses in a mutt friendly format (with the “-m” option). Edit your mutt configuration so that query_command uses pc_query:

Example from .muttrc:

set query_command="/home/username/bin/pc_query -m '%s'"

The current version features experimental write support. If you want to test this, first make sure you have a backup of your data (but please don NOT rely on pc_query –backup for this just yet), then you can put the line:

write_support = YesPleaseIDoHaveABackupOfMyData

in your config file (in the default section).

You can also import, delete or backup single cards (backup also works for the whole collection, but please don’t rely on it just yet). See pc_query –help for how to use these and for some more options.

Import Addresses from Mutt

You can directly add sender addresses from mutt to pyCardDAV, either adding them to existing contacts or creating a new one. If write support is enabled, they will be uploaded on the server during the next sync.

Example from .muttrc:

macro index,pager A "<pipe-message>pycard-import<enter>" "add sender address to pycardsyncer"

SSL

If you use SSL to interact with your CardDAV Server (you probably should) and you don’t have a certificate signed by a CA your OS Vendor trusts (like a self-signed certificate or one signed by CAcert) you can set verify to a path to the CA’s root file (must be in pem format). If you don’t want any certificate checking set verify to false to disable any ssl certificate checking (this is not recommended).

Additional Information

For now, VCard properties that have no value are not shown.

Also, you should be able to use pyCardDAV’s CardDAV implementation for other projects. See the CardDAV class in pycarddav/carddav.py.

Feedback

Please do provide feedback if pyCardDAV works for you or even more importantly if it doesn’t. You can reach me by email at pycarddav@lostpackets.de , by jabber/XMPP at geier@jabber.ccc.de or via github

License

pyCardDAV is released under the Expat/MIT License:

Copyright (c) 2011-2012 Christian Geier, David Soulayrol

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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