Calendars and Contacts in cPanel
Updated 2 weeks ago
by
Tristan Payne
Your Krystal hosting can keep calendars and contacts in step across all your devices, using two open standards: CalDAV for calendars and CardDAV for contacts. Add an appointment on your phone and it appears on your laptop; change a contact on your Mac and it changes everywhere else. It is part of your hosting, so there is nothing extra to buy and nothing to install on the server.
Find your connection settings
Everything you need in order to set up a device is on a single page. In cPanel, go to Email > Calendars and Contacts Configuration. You'll find:
- Username - your full email address, not just the part before the @.
- Password - the same password you use to log in to that mailbox. There is no separate calendar password to set up.
- Server URL and Alternate Server URL - start with the Server URL. If your app can't find your calendars automatically, use the Alternate Server URL instead, which skips auto-discovery.
- Secure SSL/TLS URLs - a direct address for each individual calendar and address book, for apps that can't fetch the list on their own.
Two things are worth knowing before you start. The addresses use your server's hostname rather than your own domain name, and the page fills in the right one for your account - so copy it from there instead of typing your domain and hoping. And every address shown is encrypted, so there is no insecure option to pick by mistake.
Don't paste those addresses into a web browser to test them. They return data meant for a calendar app, not a readable page, so a blank or odd-looking result doesn't mean anything is broken.
Set up your device
These guides walk through the steps on each platform:
- Apple devices - iPhone, iPad and Mac.
- Android devices - using the DAVx5 app.
- Linux - using Thunderbird.
Using Windows and Outlook? Outlook has no built-in support for CalDAV or CardDAV, so there is no native way to connect it. Some people use a third-party add-in such as Outlook CalDAV Synchronizer, but that isn't something we or cPanel can support, so we can't help you configure it. If you need calendars on Windows, Thunderbird works well and the Linux guide above applies to the Windows version too.
Create extra calendars, address books and task lists
Your account starts with one calendar and one address book. To add more, go to Email > Calendars and Contacts Management in cPanel and click Create. You can choose a Calendar, an Address Book or a Task List, give it a name and description, and pick a colour for calendars so they are easy to tell apart on your devices.
The same screen lets you rename or delete the ones you have added. Anything you create here appears on your devices the next time they sync.
Share a calendar or address book with someone else
Go to Email > Calendars and Contacts Sharing. You can give another person read-only access, or let them make changes as well - useful for a shared team calendar, a bookable meeting room, or a contact list everyone needs.
One thing to know first: you can only share with other email accounts on the same hosting package, so you need at least two mailboxes before the option does anything. If you only have one, cPanel will prompt you to create another before you can go any further.
How it works behind the scenes
The service handling all of this is called cpdavd. It is a background service built into cPanel that speaks CalDAV and CardDAV to your devices, and it also powers the Web Disk feature. You never need to interact with it directly - it is simply what is answering when your phone syncs.
If you set up your devices before 2024
Calendars and contacts used to be handled by a separate cPanel add-on called the Calendar and Contacts Server (CCS). cPanel removed it in version 120 and moved everything to cpdavd. Your data was migrated across at the time and nothing was lost, but any device set up under the old system needs its calendar account removed and added again using the settings above - an existing entry will simply stop syncing rather than show an error.
If you have never set this up before, you can ignore all of that and start from the top of this article.
