[kmeade]

Shortcomings of the article aside, I'd like to say that I use Caddy for a set of small websites and I couldn't really be happier with it.

I'm a longtime Windows developer who doesn't have much patience with nerdy complexities. I started in 1996 with a buggy, gawd-awful Netscape webserver, moved to the late-lamented O'Reilly WebSite (even had a T-Shirt) and reluctantly settled on MS IIS, with occasional Apache encounters. Caddy has been an absolute breath of fresh air.

I currently run 4 sites from a system at my home, using Namecheap dynamic DNS. Caddy serves the basic web pages and static content and also reverse proxies to an internal Python server for dynamic content. Sounds a little complicated, but believe me, configuration is dead-simple thanks to Caddy. Plus I get full HTTPS from Let's Encrypt for the cost of supplying my email address and agreeing to a EULA - no configuration needed at all.

I've never used a webserver that was easier to configure or had such low resource requirements.

[VT_Drew]

>I'm a longtime Windows developer who doesn't have much patience with nerdy complexities.

That is funny because I have setup Apache, Nginx, and IIS web servers before and by far the one I found to have the most nerdy complexities is IIS.

[tracker1]

I think it's often easier because most of the nerdy complexities are via a GUI... though the web.config offers a lot more in more recent versions. And adding in Application Request Routing (reverse-proxy) and the like can get complicated quickly, it's not nearly as bad as either nginx or apache tend to be. I do like what nginx can do combined with lua though, it's pretty damned cool.

All in all, I do like Caddy's defaults and out of the box for newer tech. I haven't really tried it much, mostly out of complacency with nginx/iis in Linux/windows. And I will definitely never run Apache on a new box again.

[kmeade]

I agree with both posts above me. While I normally prefer a GUI configuration facility, I wouldn't make the argument that IIS is particularly simpler than Apache.

Getting back to Caddy, configuration is so simple, a GUI would be overkill.

Here's an (entire) example of how to configure a reverse proxy in Caddy...

  proxy / 127.0.0.1:8080 {
    except /favicon.ico /robots.txt /assets /plainpages /staticstuff /test1
    proxy_header X-Forwarded-Proto {scheme}
  }

The "except" line is a list of files and directories that are statically served by Caddy.

All other content comes from a local server on port 8080.

The "proxy_header" line lets the 2nd server know when contents are being sent as secured (HTTPS)

Isn't that nice? I think so.

[mwpmaybe]

I think you want header_upstream instead of proxy_header, at least in newer versions of Caddy, and the transparent[0] preset sets Host, X-Forwarded-For, and X-Forwarded-Proto for you!

  proxy / 127.0.0.1:8080 {
    except /favicon.ico /robots.txt /assets /plainpages /staticstuff /test1
    transparent
  }

0. https://caddyserver.com/docs/proxy

[kmeade]

Thanks! I didn't notice transparent. I added the proxy_header based on documented requirements of the 2nd server.