MCDS

mcds is a command line tool primarily used as a search query plugin for mutt to query a CardDav server.

Prerequisites

• C compiler
• Curl
• LibXML2
• Optionally GPGME

Building / Installation

Building from the repository

If building from a source release package, e.g. the tarball shipped from https://github.com/t-brown/mcds/releases, skip to the next section.

mcds relies on the GNU build system autoconf and automake.

To use the autotools, invoke:

autoreconf -vi

This will recreate the configure script and other auxiliary files required for the build.

Continue with the instructions in the next section.

Building from a source release package

To install mcds with the default options (this includes GPGME support):

./configure
make
make install

This will install the binary tool in /usr/local/bin and man pages in /usr/local/man. To specify a different installation prefix, use the --prefix option to configure:

./configure --prefix=/opt
make
make install

Will install mcds in /opt/{bin,man}.

Usage

The utility mcds queries a CardDav server. For example to query all email address of people called Fred in your addressbook at the URL https://example.org/addressbook:

mcds -u https://example.org/addressbook Fred

If you had an entry for Fred Smith it would return a result like:

fred.smith@example.org   Fred Smith

mcds can make use of an rc file (${HOME}/.mcdsrc). Please read the accompanying man page for more examples and the specifications of the rc file.

Typical URLs.

The typical URL to query for various CardDav servers.

• Davical https://example.org/caldav.php/username/addresses

• Owncloud http://example.org/remote.php/carddav/addressbooks/username/contacts

• Nextcloud http://example.org/remote.php/dav/addressbooks/users/username/contacts

• Gmail https://www.googleapis.com/carddav/v1/principals/username@example.com/lists/default where one needs to subsitute your email address for username@example.com.

• Baikal https://example.org/dav.php/addressbooks/username/default/