Trying Caddy

How quickly I've abandoned nginx + certbot.

I accidentally blew away my server (with several websites), so today was a good a day as any to try caddy.

On Ubuntu, I was able to get a server up and running quickly.

sudo apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https curl
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key' | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/caddy-stable-archive-keyring.gpg
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install caddy

Then I updated /etc/caddy/Caddyfile:

import *.caddy

And then created a bunch of .caddy files for each of the websites. I have three kinds of sites I support: simple static HTML sites, legacy PHP (usually WordPress), and python (uWSGI).

Static sites are super simple with Caddy:

example.org {
	root * /var/www/example.org/site
	file_server
}

PHP isn't too bad either:

example.com {
	root * /var/www/example.com/site
	php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock
	file_server
}

uWSGI took some playing around, but is even simpler once you realize that you can't use /tmp for security reasons and you need to use http-socket instead of socket:

example.com {
	reverse_proxy * unix//run/uwsgi/example.sock
}

The only other major feature I thought I needed was URL rewriting which looked really easy. It actually took me more time to realize when I didn't need it. For example, on this blog you can get the RSS feed from /blog/feed which, previously, redirected to /blog/feed/index.xml. In Caddy you can just say:

	file_server {
		index index.html index.xml
	}

The other place I rewrite is to go from / to /blog/index.html (until such day that I have a better cover page for this site). I tried a few things ChatGPT suggested like:

  rewrite / /blog/index.html # => 404
  rewrite ^/$ /blog/index.html # => 404

But only it's final suggestion worked:

	@root {
		path /
	}
	rewrite @root /blog/index.html

This created a named matcher @root that matches the exact path of /.

I highly recommend reading through the concepts and skimming the list of directives.

Caddy is looking like a drop-in replacement for nginx + certbot.