Caddy?
Last month I had never heard of Caddy, the few websites I had hosted before I had set up with nginx. During work one of my colleagues mentioned that it’s a popular new(ish?) tool to host with which piqued my interest. I had been playing with the idea of starting a blog for a while so it was mentioned at exactly the right time. The idea was born from a bit of nostalgia I’ve had for old-school early 2000’s internet recently and felt like setting up a personal blog would be a good outlet for it, while also actually serving a purpose as a hobby project. Looking through the documentation for caddy I really like the way it’s set up to be a simple as possible but still allow for a lot of customization. The real selling point for me is the advertised automatic https though, last time it took me more time than I’d like to talk about to set up let’s encrypt cert renewal for my websites on nginx.
At first I was a bit skeptical of it being done out of the box, I often thought “There has to be a catch”. But no there was no catch. Setting up this website with https really only consisted out of the below lines. It could even be less if you go for the bare minimum! And last but not least it is actually Production ready!
integrator.guru
root * /path/to/html/website
file_server
I highly recommend everyone to try it out if you’re playing with the idea of a website. It’s a great uncomplicated mini project to start with. In the future I’ll definitely take some time to play around with the other Caddy features. It seems it has a ton of cool stuff, even a REST API which allows config changes with no downtime!
