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I want Google Calendar to show the events from a remote ics feed protected by HTTP Basic Authentication.

The URL is like:
http://user:password@host/path/eventList?site=calsite&format=calendar

But Google Calendar fails to load this URL ("could not fetch the URL").

How to achieve this?

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3 Answers 3

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Google Calendar does not have the option to access password protected feeds.

Try using Yahoo Pipes, which will generate an obfuscated feed url to use in Google Calendar. I've done this to access password protected RSS feeds in Google Reader.

To clarify: password protected iCal feed => Yahoo Pipes => Google Calendar

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    One thing to note is that this will make the feed publicly-accessible, effectively removing the password-protection. As 666damo says, the URL will be obfuscated so it shouldn't be easy to guess. However it sounds like you're hosting the calendar yourself, so you could always do the obfuscation yourself if you can change the URL...
    – x3ja
    Commented Jul 8, 2010 at 3:14
  • +1. It will be used by all of the staff to access their events information, so security-wise it is not very satisfying... On the other side, someone using http instead of https should not expect any confidentiality...
    – nic
    Commented Jul 8, 2010 at 4:29
  • You could possibly make-shift a solution using Google Calendar Sync. Outlook will read the passworded calendar and then sync it to Google. I won't lie, this 'solution' makes me cringe. ...and the computer will need to be left powered on to update any changes. google.com/support/calendar/bin/… --edited for clarity
    – 666damo
    Commented Jul 8, 2010 at 4:36
  • I attempted to use Yahoo Pipes but it kept giving me 0 items output and it wasn't transparent as to what was going wrong with it.
    – Tim Lewis
    Commented Aug 19, 2013 at 22:04
  • Anyone know if this has changed since July 2010?
    – mgjk
    Commented Jun 26, 2014 at 15:50
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As of the current support page, only "public" calendars are allowed:

You can only add a calendar using a link if the other person's calendar is public.

(The support page is about adding "someone else's Google calendar" specifically, but it seems to apply for any iCalendar source as well.)

You can get around this by:

  • Asking the calendar's owner to publish the calendar publicly. It can be a separate URL or the same one (DAViCal for example keeps requiring auth on the editable calendar URL & makes it available without auth on a separate one). Adding a secret to the URL can help to prevent guessing it. In many cases (eg. by publishing with DAViCal) the calendar author can still control each event's visibility (show completely, show only date/time but not details, hide it completely in public calendar).
  • Use some proxy service (as suggested by @666damo) to publish a private calendar (requiring auth) on a new public URL (which doesn't require auth).

To clarify, even if a URL containing basic auth (like the one in the question's example) works in other places, it doesn't work in Google Calendar when You try Add other calendars > Import from URL. In my recent test it doesn't even notify the user about the failure.

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Managed to create the fix with Pipes. Connect your URL feed to the output. Save and view your Pipe. Click 'More options' and copy the url of 'Get as iCal'. Go to TinyURL and add paste that url there. Use your new TinyURL link at google agenda. Good luck!

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