janstuemmel.de

I am always tired of administrating servers, that’s why i’m constantly searching for easier tools. Caddy is one of them, and i easily replaced apache with it.

Whats Caddy?

Caddy is a fast HTTP Server with a lot of modern features. It comes with built-in support for letsencrypt, you don’t have to configure it manually. There are a lot of nice features, like markdown rendering, just check out the docs at caddyserver.com/docs.

How to use?

Download binaries at caddyserver.com/download or just piping in a bash script via curl https://getcaddy.com | bash. After installing to your PATH you will have the caddy command in your shell.

Place a simple Caddyfile in a directory with following contents:

:1337
browse

Then type caddy in your commandline and visit http://localhost:1337 in your browser. You can now browse the files in that directory.

Serving websites like apache

Goals

caddy runs as a service (systemd)
caddy runs in user mode
one Caddyfile to configure all sites
caddy proxies to my webservices via subdomain
HTTPS

Example Webservice

Just an example server listening on port 1337, serving static content in current directory.

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 1337

Configuartion

We will create a user called caddy, the systemd service runs on that user. The Caddyfile will be located at /etc/caddy/Caddyfile.

# adding a user caddy and creating /home/caddy
useradd -m caddy

Create the service file at /etc/systemd/system/caddy.service, this is actually from here:

[Unit]
Description=Caddy Web Server
Documentation=https://caddyserver.com/docs
After=network.target

[Service]
User=caddy
StartLimitInterval=86400
StartLimitBurst=5
LimitNOFILE=16535
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/caddy -agree=true -conf=/etc/caddy/Caddyfile -pidfile=/var/run/caddy/caddy.pid -log=stderr
PIDFile=/var/run/caddy/caddy.pid
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Give execution rights to caddy and enable/start the service:

chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/caddy.service
systemctl enable caddy.service
systemctl start caddy.service

Create the Caddyfile in /etc/caddy/Caddyfile, with contents:

foo.example.com {
  proxy / 127.0.0.1:1337
}