pro-tacts

A CardDAV server for my family.

Simplifying assumptions

Small, trusted user group (2-3 people) — no permissions or access controls
Network access via Tailscale — simple authentication
Apple devices only (it might happen to work on other CardDAV clients, but only accidentally)

What it does

Each person's phones and Macs sync an address book over CardDAV. Everyone gets the shared family book, and each person can have contacts of their own on top of it. The server keeps the whole of each card a device writes, including what it does not understand, so nothing a client stores is lost on the way through.

A group holds an address or a note written once and shared by every member's card. A member editing that line on a device changes it for everyone.

The same server has a web interface for finding and editing contacts and groups, setting up a device, and importing a .vcf or a Monica export one contact at a time. Every pull request gets a preview deployment serving a sample book.

Who is asking is decided by the Tailscale proxy in front of the app, which writes the identity into a header, so the app must be reachable only through that proxy: bind it to localhost. rake db:dump commits a plain snapshot of everything to a git repository in the data directory.

Failures are reported to Sentry without any card content; the full exchange stays in a local log. Every setting is an environment variable, documented where ProTacts::Config reads it.

pro-tacts

Simplifying assumptions

What it does

Further reading