ICS → Discourse Importer

[Ethsim2 (Ethan)]

I’ve built a small utility that continuously syncs events from an iCalendar (ICS) feed into a Discourse category via the REST API.

This isn’t a full Discourse plugin — it runs alongside your Discourse install — so it belongs here in #extras. If you want to display calendar events from an external source (e.g. Google Calendar, University timetable feeds, etc.) inside Discourse topics, this will be useful.

Repository

GitHub - Ethsim12/Discourse-ICS-importer-by-REST-API: Import and continuously sync events from an...

How it works

• Reads events from a given ICS feed
• Matches them against existing topics (by UID or fallback to time/location)
• Creates or updates topics in your chosen category
• Can run continuously as a systemd service (safe against duplicate execution via flock)

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Requirements

• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (tested)
• Python 3 (already in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)
• A Discourse API key

The script sometimes needs to reset a topic’s bump date.

Discourse doesn’t support bypass_bump as a parameter, so when my script detects no meaningful changes,

it logs this and then calls /t/{topic_id}/reset-bump-date to avoid bumping the topic.

This endpoint is staff-only and requires a global API key.

If you use a granular key, the sync will still work, but you’ll see 403 errors in the logs whenever reset-bump-date is attempted.

• A category ID to target for event topics

Example output

Here’s what it looks like when syncing a University timetable ICS feed into Discourse:

Quick start

Clone the repo and install requirements:

git clone https://github.com/Ethsim12/Discourse-ICS-importer-by-REST-API.git /opt/ics-sync
cd /opt/ics-sync
pip install -r requirements.txt

Run a sync once manually:

python3 ics_to_discourse.py \
  --ics "https://example.com/feed.ics" \
  --category-id 4 \
  --site-tz "Europe/London" \
  --static-tags "events,ics"

Set up as a systemd service/timer for continuous sync (example configs in the repo).