better-tiss-calendar

TISS is the information service of TU Wien which exports a suboptimal calendar of events (like lectures). This project improves the calendar by rewriting the events and enriching them with useful information.

Live Website

Features

• Remove lecture number from the title
• Use shorthands instead of the long name (optional)
• Correct address in the location field, not just the room
• Floor information
• Links to TUW-Maps (and TISS on HTML enabled clients)
• Drop in replacement
• Easy setup: no login, no account and no rage inducing captchas
• Self-hosting friendly

Importing the calendar

Adding the bettercal calendar to your outlook, google calendar or iPhone app is identical to the official Tiss calendar. However, if you have never done that or not in a long time, here are some guides:

• iPhone
• macOS
• Gmail (Note: you can only add it on desktop, but then it will also show up on mobile)
• Outlook

How it works

Calendar clients download subscribed calendars periodically (some even let you set the polling rate). Now with bettercal when a request comes in for a calendar this server downloads the original calendar from tiss and formats all events and enriches them with more information before returning it to the client.

Build it yourself

You first need to install python3.13 and node.

npm install
npx tailwindcss -i app/templates/template.css -o app/static/style.css
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
flask --app app run --debug

The server should now start at http://localhost:5000

Note: While working on the frontend, it is quite handy to add the --watch flag to the tailwind command.

Warning: The flask server here cannot be used in production and is optimized for development comfort.

You can run all tests with:

python -m pytest

Build with Docker

docker build -t bettercal .
docker run -it --rm -p 5000:5000 bettercal

The server should now start at http://localhost:5000

This approach can be used in production. However, statistics will die with the container, but they can be preserved by adding the --mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)"/bettercal.db,target=/app/bettercal.db argument to the docker run command.

How we deploy

In production we use the gunicorn server. The main branch is automatically deployed as a systemd user service on a linux box. The systemd config can be read in bettercal.service.

Contributing

Contributions are quite welcome, you are awesome. 😊🎉

If you want to add a shorthand for a lecture, the file you need to edit is ressources/shorthands.csv.