Nextcloud CardDAV and CalDAV discovery with DNS records

I use a self-hosted Nextcloud instance to hold a lot of my personal data, and that includes my contacts and calendars. Recently I had to reinstall DAVx5 on my phone, and I was surprised that the Nextcloud account was failing to be added.

The DAVx5 error logs showed that it was making requests to the /.well-known/caldav and /.well-known/carddav URLs, as described in RFC 6764. Nextcloud was returning proper 301 HTTP responses, checked in a web browser, that redirected to the actual WebDAV endpoint, so it looks like the problem was that DAVx5 wasn't properly following them.

Browsing the DAVx5 documentation on service discovery they mention that the DAV standard also supports using SRV and TXT DNS records pointing to the endpoints to be used for CardDAV and CalDAV, and I decide to give it a go as it sounded easier than further debugging DAVx5 or digging into Nextcloud's and/or the webserver's configuration.

I added the following DNS records to fidelramos.net:

_caldavs._tcp 10800 IN SRV 0 1 443 cloud.fidelramos.net.
_caldavs._tcp 10800 IN TXT "path=/remote.php/dav/"
_carddavs._tcp 10800 IN SRV 0 1 443 cloud.fidelramos.net.
_carddavs._tcp 10800 IN TXT "path=/remote.php/dav/"

The path I find by following /.well-known/caldav and /.well-known/carddav URLs in my Nextcloud instance.

Once the DNS records were in place DAVx5 connected successfully, but I had to use fidelramos.net as the base URL, instead of cloud.fidelramos.net as before.