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+---
+title: >-
+    DAV is All You Need
+description: >-
+    Contacts, calendars, passwords, oh my!
+tags: tech
+---
+
+For some time now I've been trying to find an alternative solution to Google
+Keep for shared note taking. The motivation for this change was two-fold:
+
+* Google sucks, and I'm trying to get their products out of my life in favor of
+  self-hosted options.
+
+* Google Keep _really_ sucks. Seriously, it can barely load on my Chromebook
+  because of whatever bloated ass web framework they're using for it. It's just
+  a note taking app!
+
+So this weekend I buckled down and actually made the switch. The first step was
+to find something to switch _to_, however, which ended up being not trivial.
+There's a million different options in this space, but surprisingly few which
+could fulfill the exact niche we need in our household:
+
+* Fully open-source and open protocol. If it's not open it's not worth the
+  bother of switching, cause we'll just have to do it all again once whatever
+  product we switch to gets acqui-hired by a food delivery app.
+
+* Self-hosted using a _simple_ server-side component. I'm talking something that
+  listens on a public port and saves data to a file on disk, and _that's it_.
+  No database processes, no message queues, no bullshit. We're not serving a
+  million users here, there's no reason to broaden the attack surface
+  unnecessarily.
+
+* Multi-platform support, including mobile. Our primary use-case here is our
+  grocery list, which needs to be accessible by everyone everywhere.
+
+I've already got a Nextcloud instance running at home, and there is certainly a
+notes extension for it, so that could have been an option here. But Nextcloud
+very much does not fall into the second point above: it's not simple. It's a
+giant PHP app that uses Postgres as a backend, has its own authentication and
+session system, and has a plugin system. Frankly, it was easily the biggest
+security hole on the entire server, and I wasn't eager to add usage to it.
+
+Happily, I found another solution.
+
+## WebDAV
+
+There's a project called [Joplin](https://joplinapp.org/) which implements a
+markdown-based notes system with clients for Android, iPhone, Linux, Mac, and
+Windows. Somewhat interestingly there is _not_ a web client for it, but on
+further reflection I don't think that's a big deal... no bloated javascript
+frameworks to worry about at least.
+
+In addition to their own cloud backend, Joplin supports a number of others, with
+the most interesting being WebDAV. WebDAV is an XML-based extension to HTTP
+which allows for basic write operations on the server-side, and which uses
+HTTP's basic auth for authentication. You can interact with it using curl if you
+like, it really can't get simpler.
+
+[Caddy](https://caddyserver.com/) is the server I use to handle all incoming
+HTTP requests to my server, and luckily there's a semi-official
+[WebDAV](https://github.com/mholt/caddy-webdav) plugin which adds WebDAV
+support. With that compiled in, the `Caddyfile` configuration is nothing more
+than:
+
+```
+hostname.com {
+
+    route {
+
+        basicauth {
+            sharedUser sharedPassword
+        }
+
+
+        webdav {
+            root /data/webdav
+        }
+
+    }
+
+}
+```
+
+With that in place, any Joplin client can be pointed at `hostname.com` using the
+shared username/assword, and all data is stored directly to `/data/webdav` by
+Caddy. Easy-peasy.
+
+## CardDAV/CalDAV
+
+Where WebDAV is an extension of HTTP to allow for remotely modifying files
+genearlly, CardDAV and CalDAV are extensions of WebDAV for managing remote
+stores of contacts and calendar events, respectively. At least, that's my
+understanding.
+
+Nextcloud has its own Web/Card/CalDAV service, and that's what I had been, up
+till this point, using for syncing my contacts and calendar from my phone. But
+now that I was setting up a separate WebDAV endpoint, I figured it'd be worth
+setting up a separate Card/CalDAV service and get that much closer to getting
+off Nextcloud entirely.
+
+There is, as far as I know, no Card or CalDAV extension for Caddy, so I'd still
+need a new service running. I came across
+[radicale](https://radicale.org/v3.html), which fits the bill nicely. It's a
+simple CalDAV and CardDAV server which saves directly to disk, much like the
+Caddy WebDAV plugin. With that running, I needed only to add the following to my
+`Caddyfile`, above the `webdav` directive:
+
+```
+handle /radicale/* {
+
+    uri strip_prefix /radicale
+
+    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:5454 {
+        header_up X-Script-Name /radicale
+    }
+
+}
+```
+
+Now I could point the [DAVx5](https://www.davx5.com/) app on my phone to
+`hostname.com/radicale` and boom, contact and calendar syncing was within reach.
+I _did_ have a lot of problems getting DAVx5 working properly, but those were
+more to do with Android than self-hosting, and I eventually worked through them.
+
+## Passwords
+
+At this point I considered that the only thing I was still really using
+Nextcloud for was password management, a la Lastpass or 1Password. I have a lot
+of gripes with Nextcloud's password manager, in addition to my aforementioned
+grips with Nextcloud generally, so I thought it was worth seeing if some DAV or
+another could be the final nail in Nextcloud's coffin.
+
+A bit of searching around led me to [Tusk](https://subdavis.com/Tusk/), a chrome
+extension which allows the chrome browser to fetch a
+[KeePassXC](https://keepassxc.org/) database from a WebDAV server, decode it,
+and autofill it into a website. Basically perfect. I had only to export my
+passwords from Nextcloud as a CSV, import them into a fresh KDBX file using the
+KeePassXC GUI, place the file in my WebDAV folder, and point Tusk at that.
+
+I found the whole experience of using Tusk to be extremely pleasant. Everything
+is very well labeled and described, and there's appropriate warnings and such in
+places where someone might commit a security crime (e.g. using the same password
+for WebDAV and their KDBX file).
+
+My one gripe is that it seems to be very slow to unlock the file in practice. I
+don't _think_ this has to do with my server, as Joplin is quite responsive, so
+it could instead have to do with my KDBX file's decryption difficulty setting.
+Perhaps Tusk is doing the decryption in userspace javascript... I'll have to
+play with it some.
+
+But it's a small price to be able to turn off Nextcloud completely, which I have
+now done. I can sleep easier at night now, knowing there's not some PHP
+equivalent to Log4j which is going to bite me in the ass one day while I'm on
+vacation.