Installing on Debian or Ubuntu Linux

Usermode

Debian/Ubuntu

Preparation

Install pipx

# as root user
apt-get install pipx

Installation

# as normal user
pipx install https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/archive/master.tar.gz
pipx ensurepath

Run

# as normal user
pipx run radicale --logging-level info --storage-filesystem-folder=~/.var/lib/radicale/collections

Systemwide

Unfortunatly LTS versions stay on old version for unknown reason and cannot be recommended to use as underlying OS for such purpose.

Recommendation: use Enterprise Linux instead -> https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/wiki/Installing-on-Enterprise-Linux---Fedora

See also

• https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/discussions/1686
• https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/discussions/2072

Packages

Ubuntu

See also

• https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=radicale

Debian

See also

• https://packages.debian.org/radicale

Installation

# as root user
apt-get install radicale

Upgrading to master from outdated Ubuntu package version of radicale (tested on ubuntu 24.04 LTS)

1. Complete the above steps to install radicale from the official ubuntu repos (currently version 3.1.8) so all necessary directories and a user get created.
2. Install radicale from the master repository with pip

# this assumes that radicale has already been installed via "apt install radicale"
# install python-venv
apt install python3.12-venv

# create installation folder as python virtual environment
python3 -m venv /venv/radicale

# change into radicale folder and install radicale from master with the local venv installation of pip
cd /venv/radicale/ && bin/pip install https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/archive/master.tar.gz

# set permissions for the radicale user
chown -R radicale:radicale /venv/radicale/

3. The apt installation will have created and populated /etc/radicale/ with two files, config and rights. These files are still outdated and should be overwritten by the recent version available in radicale/master before initial configuration of radicale. The files are part of the master.tar.gz archive but not present in the venv after installation. Either you get them from the archive or directly from github: config rights
4. To have systemd start radicale from our venv we need to override the existing systemd unit radicale.service by running (as root) systemctl edit radicale.service. Into the editor that opens paste the following (read comments on where to paste the overrides!):

[Service]
# to override ExecStart you first need to unset it because override is rather append in systemd
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/venv/radicale/bin/python -m radicale
Environment="PATH=/venv/radicale/bin"

5. Configure and run radicale

Upgrading venv installation with pip

To upgrade the venv installation run (as root):

su -s /bin/bash -c "/venv/radicale/bin/pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/archive/master.tar.gz" radicale