How to set up open-source Calendly alternative Cal.com in Docker

Flexibility is the word when it comes to self-hosting event schedulers compared to their SaaS alternatives besides the usual benefits of self-hosting. In this blog post, you can find out how to setup Cal.com, an open-source event scheduler alternative to Calendly, and more importantly, why you should consider it.

First of all, why would you self-host an event scheduler application?

There are many SaaS alternatives, like Calendly, Doodle, Microsoft Bookings and so on. Oftentimes, these options have some restrictions baked in that makes them slightly off to your use case. Event scheduling has a single purpose – to arrange meetings fast and efficiently – but many times, the way users should be able to book a meeting differs. Open-source alternatives, like Cal.com offer the flexibility needed in this area.

Setting up Self-Hosted Cal.com with dyrector.io

As Cal.com users ourselves, we came across the Hacker News discussion where lots of users discussed how self-hosting the Calendly-alternative works. So, we decided to turn Cal.com into a template on dyrector.io for a faster, easier setup. Below you can see how to set it up to a server you use without getting into the details of setting up a VPS and a domain.

After signing in to dyrector.io, select the Templates section on the right side. Select Cal.com from the templates listed by clicking Add.

You’re able to specify a name and a description to the Cal.com stack you plan to deploy. Depending on if you plan to roll out the latest version of Cal.com, you can pick if you want to deploy Cal.com as a simple or a complex type of product. More details on the differences here, but a simple product will likely do for most users.

Click Add to save Cal.com as a product.

On the next screen, click Add deployment.

Select the node and click Add.

Click on the gear icon next to each image for configuration settings. On the configuration screen, specify the following variables with your domain:

• cal-db
  • POSTGRES_PASSWORD has to be specified.
• cal-com
  • DATABASE_URL needs to contain POSTGRES_PASSWORD's value in postgresql://cal-user:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@cal-db:5432/cal-db for cal-db.
  • NEXTAUTH_SECRET and CALENDSO_ENCRYPTION_KEY needs to be specified. We recommend OpenSSL to generate these secrets.
  • If you have a node with Traefik enabled you can use http://cal.localhost (or any other domain setup in the ingress settings) by setting NEXT_PUBLIC_WEBAPP_URL to the public URL.

If you’d like to access your Cal.com from a specific domain, then the follow the configuration setting instructions below:

• name, host under Ingress section. name is the first part of the domain, host is the second. Example: if your domain is booking.example.com, then name = booking, host = example.com.

• DOMAIN under Environments section. Example: if your domain is booking.example.com, then DOMAIN key will be booking.example.com.

On the configuration settings screen, click Back to save all configuration settings.

On the next screen, click Deploy to setup Cal.com.

If you've got the image downloaded already, the deployment should be successful in a few minutes, as seen in the screenshot below. For first time deployments, the image download and extraction process should take a few minutes, since the image is about 5 GBs.

A few minutes after deployment, the container will charge up. The result look something like this.

After the deployment is successful, you’re able to embed your self-hosted Cal.com to your website, as documented here.

This blogpost was written by the team of dyrector.io. dyrector.io is an open-source container management platform.

Check out our project on GitHub.