Calendar Address iCloud Lightning Sync

I found the solution yesterday after trying the methods mentioned here and in a couple of other places.

1. In your browser, login to iCloud and open Calendar.

2. Click on the little greyed-out "Share Calendar" icon beside the name of any calendar you want to view in Thunderbird/Lightning.

3. There are 2 options - Private and Public. Select Public.

4. A URL will be provided for anyone you want to share your calendar with. It starts with "webcal" instead of "https". Select and copy this URL.

5. Go to Thunderbird/Lightning and create a new calendar. (File->New->Calendar or just right-click an existing calendar and select "New Calendar" from the pop-up menu.)

6. Create the calendar "On the Network" and click "Next".

7. For "Format" select "iCalendar (ICS) and paste the sharing URL from #4 into the "Location" box. Click "Next"

8. Give your calendar a name. Select the colour and update frequency that you want. Click "Next".

9. Click "Finish".

10. Repeat for each calendar you want to view in Thunderbird/Lightning.

Publicly subscribed calendars are supposed to be read-only. I haven't tried to add any events on T/L yet (am having issues with clearing reminders that keep popping up and slowing things down, which I'm going to investigate next) but even though it's possible in T/L to unclick "read-only" in the calendar's properties (right-click) , a little lock keeps reappearing beside some of the calendars on my list so I'm not really expecting to be able to do so.

I hope this works for all of you too!

Erusa

After all you find on the web is only half the truth, here's the real deal:

Go to

/Users/<youruser>/Library/Calendars/...

(that much is true (iWolfgang - thanks!))

Find out which of the xxx.caldav-Folders it the one of your iCloud-calendar (if you have multiple calendars like me):

The contained "Info.plist"-file should contain something like this:

(if it contains something like "group.calendar.google.com" you're in the wrong folder ;-) )

Found the right folder? Fine!

So this is the URL to start (not ready yet!):

https://p0X-caldav.icloud.com/1234567890/

(The "X" should be a number, and "1234567890" should be some different ID (your ID))

Now check the sub-folders of the main-folder you found. Open the "Info.plist"-file again. You will find something like this:

(Example for your "work" folder)

Combine the infos you found to this URL:

https://p0X-caldav.icloud.com/1234567890/calendars/work/

This is the URL you got to use with Lightning (New calendar -> network -> choose "CalDAV" / address: see above)!

Enjoy!

Stephan

one more remark. If Daniel's tool does not work for you or if you don't want to use it you also can assemble the URL by yourself if you have a Mac. The URL has to follow this scheme:

https://p0x-caldav.icloud.com/<user_id>/calendars/<calendar_id>/

like:

https://p01-caldav.icloud.com/1234567890/calendars/XXXXXXXX-YYYY-ZZZZ-AAAA-BBBBB BBBBBBB/

you find the id's by crawling thorough the directories and files in your /Users/<youruser>/Library/Calendars/...

The servername prefix (e.g. p01-) seems no to be important. It even can be omitted.

regards

Wolfgang

Please ignore my previous post. I found an Info.plist entry for https://p0X-caldav.icloud.com/nnnnnnnnnn/calendars/tasks/ and it works!, Lightning recoginizes my iCloud Reminders as Tasks and they correctly show up in the "Tasks" tab. My only issue is that they don't appear in the "Today Pane". I know that with Tasks in native Lightning Calendars I need to have a Reminder of "before task ends" to make them visible in the Today Pane. Unfortunately those options are greyed out in Lighting for my Tasks in my iCloud calendar, and there is no User Interface to set them in iCloud or on iOS.

BigLynx,

I don't know about iCloud on Windows, but I would first search my home-directory for a file containing "PrincipalURL" or "CalendarPath".

If this doesn't work there is a way to at least find out your "p0X"-Server and ID:

Use Safari and surf to the icloud.com Website. Log in and browse to the calendar. Now check the activity-window to find out about the URLs you are surfing.

You will find something like this:

https://p0X-calendarws.icloud.com/ca/idle?dsid=1234567890&clientVersion=...

(maybe you got to open the "https://www.icloud.com/applications/calendar/en-us/"-folder to find this link)

Once again you got to copy the "p0X"- and user-info to the target-URL:

https://p0X-caldav.icloud.com/1234567890/calendars/work/

Don't know how to find out about the calendar-name this way. Default for work is "work", default for home is "home"...

With this said: Tell your friend to buy a Mac.

Enjoy

Stephan

My setup:

desktop computer:

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Thunderbird 17.0.5

Lightning 1.9.1

laptop computer:

MacBook Pro / OS 10.7.5

Using Stephan's instructions from 2012-02-02 post, I was able to create Lightning calendars on desktop computer from 8 calendars that had been sync'd to iCloud from laptop computer.

Created URLs for these calendars from looking through laptop directory path. Note that these URLs were of the form:

https://pXX-caldav.icloud.com:443/#myUniqueIDHere#/calendars/#calendar_name#/

where XX is a two-digit number, and #calendar_name# was either the name of my calendar, such as "home" (in 1 case), or a lengthy series of characters as described in iWolfgang's post of 2011-10-26.

For 6 of 8 calendars, Lightning had full read-write access -- changes made in Lightning on desktop computer propagated to iCal on laptop within seconds. For 2 of 8 calendars, attempted changes in Lighting triggered "server error 403." Not sure what the critical differences are between the calendars in this case, so, for now, these 2 calendars are read-only in Lightning.

Note that I tried Erusa's instructions, and they also work, however, all calendars were then read-only in Lightning since they were being shared "Public" from iCloud. Using the method descibed above, no particular sharing settings needed to be set for the calendars in iCloud.

Many thanks to all for your help and information.

-Chas

If you have Firefox with the Firebug addon it is rather easy to figure out the right URL components. Just open the Web iCloud calendar and, for example, disable/enable a calendar. Then look at the content of the POST request.

SSL isn't an issue here as you are looking at the request in FF, not at the network level.

You will notice that the display name of the calendar and its id in the request can differ.

Regards,

Stefan

Hi,

I tried everything described in this thread and still didn't work until I modified the agent parameter as mentioned in this link:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.support.calendar/ISvf4jRHrmo/6hwua

After this it works like a charm!

Regards,

Oscar

Just an FYI Lightening and Thunderbird do now work with iCloud, you may have to download the latest beta version (10 point something I think) but it should sync no problems.

Now all we need a solution for is address book.

TroyM68 wrote:

I am obviously doing something wrong!

Well, so am I. Obviously.

I'm running Thunderbird 17.0.4 on Ubuntu 12.04.1 with Lightning 1.9.1.

On my Mac (10.8.3) I searched the .../Library/Calendars folder and found some information in different .plist-files

The principal-URL seems to be: https://p04-caldav.icloud.com:443/#myUniqueIDHere#/calendars/principal.

I added a new calendar, changing the URL to https://p04-caldav.icloud.com:443/#myUniqueIDHere#/calendars/Privat where 'Privat' (yes, I'm german) is the name of the Calendar. I had to take a look ar some other .plist-files to prove.

I was wondering wether the port number has to be part of the URL or not. So I tried both. No luck. Calendar ist still not available (yellow triangle with an exclamation mark shows a mouse-over-hint).

Tried different calendars as well (privat, work, Work, arbeit, Arbeit,...) but all the same

Right. Since you are using a HTTPS-URL the only thing you will see this way is the host you are connecting to.

The URL-path will be part of the HTTP-GET-Request, which will be encoded already.

What you need is a proxy that can act as a man-in-the-middle, so you can inspect the request being send:

http://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/proxying/ssl-proxying/

I'm would also like to sync lightning with the iCloud calendar, however atm it is only possible to use the public share option which is read only.

I hope this can be done in the future!!

I had the same problem but since Lightning was updated to 1.2.1 it works very good. I run the same spec as 3 posts above: W7, TB 10.0 and Lightning 1.2.1

And just to make sure ... you don't reaaly use the "x" in "https://p0x-caldav...." - do you?

regards

Wolfgang

Well - in this case Lightning will have a hard time to form a calendar out of it :-D

Try to find out your corrent URL. If the .plist-files-approach doesn't help you, try network-sniffing while using the Mac OS Calendar App.