How to Self-Host Baikal 2026

TL;DR

Baikal (GPL 3.0, ~2K GitHub stars, PHP) is a CalDAV/CardDAV server built on the sabre/dav library — the same library powering many hosting providers' calendar sync. Its key advantage over Radicale is the browser-based admin UI for managing users, calendars, and address books without touching config files. If you want CalDAV/CardDAV that non-technical users can manage via a web interface, Baikal is the right choice.

Key Takeaways

Baikal: GPL 3.0, ~2K stars, PHP — CalDAV/CardDAV with a web admin UI
sabre/dav: Battle-tested CalDAV/CardDAV library used by Nextcloud, ownCloud, and hosting providers
Web admin: Create users, calendars, and address books in a browser
SQLite or MySQL: Choice of database backend
vs Radicale: Baikal has a web UI; Radicale is even more minimal (config file only)
vs Nextcloud: Baikal is just calendar/contacts — no files, no apps overhead

Part 1: Docker Setup

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  baikal:
    image: ckulka/baikal:nginx
    container_name: baikal
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8800:80"
    volumes:
      - baikal_config:/var/www/baikal/config
      - baikal_specific:/var/www/baikal/Specific
    environment:
      - TZ=America/Los_Angeles

volumes:
  baikal_config:
  baikal_specific:

docker compose up -d

Visit http://your-server:8800/admin/ for first-time setup.

Part 2: First-Run Setup

Admin Panel URL: https://cal.yourdomain.com/admin/
Set admin password
Database: Choose SQLite (simple) or MySQL (multi-user production)
Click Save changes

With MySQL backend

services:
  baikal:
    image: ckulka/baikal:nginx
    environment:
      - BAIKAL_MYSQL=true
      - BAIKAL_MYSQL_HOST=db
      - BAIKAL_MYSQL_DBNAME=baikal
      - BAIKAL_MYSQL_USERNAME=baikal
      - BAIKAL_MYSQL_PASSWORD="${MYSQL_PASSWORD}"
    depends_on:
      - db

  db:
    image: mariadb:10.11
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MARIADB_DATABASE: baikal
      MARIADB_USER: baikal
      MARIADB_PASSWORD: "${MYSQL_PASSWORD}"
      MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD: "${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD}"
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/mysql

volumes:
  db_data:

Part 3: HTTPS with Caddy

cal.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:8800
}

Part 4: Create Users and Collections

Via web admin

Log in at https://cal.yourdomain.com/admin/
Users and resources → + Add user
- Username: alice
- Display name: Alice Smith
- Email: alice@yourdomain.com
- Password: set password
Click the user → Add calendar
- Calendar ID: personal
- Display name: Personal
- Description: Personal calendar
Click the user → Add address book
- Address book ID: contacts
- Display name: Contacts

Via URL structure

After creating users, the CalDAV/CardDAV URLs are:

# Calendar (CalDAV):
https://cal.yourdomain.com/dav.php/principals/alice/
https://cal.yourdomain.com/dav.php/calendars/alice/personal/

# Contacts (CardDAV):
https://cal.yourdomain.com/dav.php/addressbooks/alice/contacts/

Part 5: iOS / macOS Setup

Calendar (CalDAV) — iOS

Settings → Calendar → Accounts → Add Account → Other
Add CalDAV Account
Server: https://cal.yourdomain.com
Username: alice
Password: your password
Description: Baikal Calendar

iOS auto-discovers calendars. After adding account, check Settings → Calendar → Accounts → your account — calendars should appear.

Contacts (CardDAV) — iOS

Settings → Contacts → Accounts → Add Account → Other
Add CardDAV Account
Server: https://cal.yourdomain.com
Username: alice, Password: your password

macOS

System Settings → Internet Accounts → Add Account → Other
Add both CalDAV Account and CardDAV Account
Account type: Advanced → enter server URL manually

Part 6: Android with DAVx⁵

Install DAVx⁵ from F-Droid (free) or Google Play
+ → Login with URL and username
Base URL: https://cal.yourdomain.com/dav.php
Username: alice, Password: your password
DAVx⁵ discovers all calendars and address books
Toggle each to enable sync

Part 7: Thunderbird

Calendar

Calendar → New Calendar → On the Network → CalDAV
URL: https://cal.yourdomain.com/dav.php/calendars/alice/personal/
Username: alice, Password: your password

Contacts

Address Book → New Address Book → CardDAV
URL: https://cal.yourdomain.com/dav.php/addressbooks/alice/contacts/
Username: alice, Password: your password

Baikal supports shared calendars via the admin UI:

Admin → Users → alice → [Calendar] → Share
Add user bob with read or read/write access
Bob's device syncs to: https://cal.yourdomain.com/dav.php/calendars/alice/shared-calendar/

For family or team use, create a dedicated shared user:

User: family (password: shared-password)
Calendar: family-events
Address book: family-contacts

Everyone connects with username "family" to sync shared data.

Maintenance

# Update:
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

# Backup SQLite:
docker cp baikal:/var/www/baikal/Specific/db/baikal.db \
  ./baikal-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).db

# Backup all config and data:
tar -czf baikal-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz \
  $(docker volume inspect baikal_baikal_config --format '{{.Mountpoint}}') \
  $(docker volume inspect baikal_baikal_specific --format '{{.Mountpoint}}')

# Logs:
docker compose logs -f baikal

Why Self-Host Baikal?

The case for self-hosting Baikal comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Baikal means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Baikal, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Baikal headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Baikal data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Baikal without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Baikal's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Baikal backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Baikal's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Baikal's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Baikal's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Baikal's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f baikal

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Baikal's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats baikal. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Baikal Updated

Baikal follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Baikal is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

See also: Radicale (even more minimal, config-file only)

See all open source calendar tools at OSSAlt.com/categories/productivity.

The SaaS-to-Self-Hosted Migration Guide (Free PDF)