Calendar synchronization

This is a small tool that can be used to synchronize a Jekyll event collection with a remote calendar.

Installation

Use Python package manager

pip install twomartens.calendarsync

Afterwards you can use tm-calendarsync to access the CLI interface. If you installed the package into a virtual environment, this environment needs to be activated. Otherwise the tm-calendarsync command will not be known.

Usage

tm-calendarsync calendar_url event_collection_path

The CLI interface validates the input and guarantees that the URL is valid and the directory of the event collection exists. It however does not make logical checks. So you need to make sure that the directory is actually the correct one. The URL for the calendar must be readable without authentication and point to an ICS file.

If the input is correct the tool will go through ALL events of the calendar and create files in the event collection directory. The filename of these is as follows:

YYYY-MM-DD-title.markdown where all spaces in the title are replaced by underscores (_).

The content of these files follows this structure:

# preamble for Jekyll event (this line is not actually written)
---
layout: event
title:  <name>
date: <created>
start_date: <begin>
end_date: <end>
location: <location>
address: <address>
---

Both location and address are extracted from the location field in a calendar event. If a colon (:) is existing the first part is the location and the latter part the address. If it does not exist the content of the location field will be used for both location and address.

The full usage of this tool becomes obvious if you create a cronjob or something similar that executes this code every x amount of time.

Note: Even if you run this as a cronjob it will not yet result in any visible changes to the Jekyll-powered website. You will need to trigger the build yourself in whatever way makes sense to you.