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Caddy is a wonderful alternative for nginx for small / medium sized projects I've worked with it on. Mid market enterprise is where I have seen alot of Caddy up

Caddy is a wonderful alternative for nginx for small / medium sized projects I've worked with it on. Mid market enterprise is where I have seen alot of Caddy uptick as of late. nginx has a ton of inertia, but Caddy is a welcome player. I highly recommend anyone into this sort of thing give it a try. The configuration is so easy by comparison and its handling of HTTPS certs automatically is a huge win. I feel its a leap forward from the typical Apache / nginx setup to me nowadays

drcongo 3y ago
Agree with all of this - Caddy is a great project.
bklyn11201 3y ago
Caddy is indeed wonderful for straightforward and simple projects. There are a number of complex configurations used by larger organizations that are well served today by Nginx Plus, HAProxy, and Traefik that don't seem possible with Caddy. And it's difficult to get a sense of whether the Caddy developers are interested in meeting those more complex use cases or whether they want to keep Caddy smaller and simpler. But yes, by all means, for a simple project pick Caddy!
- bosch_mind 3y ago
  Can you speak more to usecases that aren’t fulfilled by Caddy? Also, any ideas if performance matches NGINX at scale?
- mholt 3y ago
  Caddy is more capable and extensible than all those servers, even out of the box. Example: https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/5472#issuecomment-1966563229 https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/5472#issuecomment-... > welcome to 2024. it is shame that traefik cannot handle functionality which can be handled by caddy2. (posted this morning) Anyway, we already do walk up to quite a few complex requirements in large enterprise deployments. Happy to hear about your use case that isn't possible!
  - bklyn11201 3y ago
    1) Nginx Plus and HAProxy have nice consoles to view your thousand upstreams and their current health. The Nginx Plus GUI is Apache 2.0 (https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-plus-dashboard https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-plus-dashboard). 2) Nginx has this concept of rewrite "last" (instead of permanent or temporary) 3) Nginx Plus and HAProxy both have TCP routing OOTB without needing to recompile 4) Nginx and Nginx Plus have more ability to intercept a response from an upstream and modify it vs Caddy's fairly limited handle_response {} 5) Modify body content from upstream seems to require a Caddy module 6) Very difficult to find good Caddy configs and thus why LLMs have such a hard-time helping people with Caddy configs. Having a library of configs would probably help this training There seems to be an incredible market opportunity for Caddy as I've lost a lost of trust in the Nginx ecosystem and commercial environment. I would get some of these modules into core Caddy so that they are easy to distribute to people used to just installing via apt. And then attack the Nginx Plus features one by one. Add a visual console even though I understand why it doesn't seem like a necessity. I'd love to see Caddy take share and would love to re-allocate my Nginx Plus spend over to Caddy support.
polishdude20 3y ago
I've used Caddy in the past and it worked well but the syntax for their config caddyfile is just so confusing. I haven't found a tutorial to explain how it all works properly.
- mholt 3y ago
  We're revamping our docs this year; you can often express what you need in in JSON if it's not elegant in the Caddyfile.
- francislavoie 3y ago
  We recommend starting here, to understand the structure: https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/concepts https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/concepts Anything in particular you find confusing?
  - polishdude20 3y ago
    I don't remember that structure diagram being there back when I used it. Unfortunately I don't remember what I was trying to do anymore.
    - francislavoie 3y ago
      That diagram's been unchanged since our v2.0 release. /shrug
turtlebits 3y ago
I've tried to use Caddy several times (once before the config lang changed and once after). Configuration was a nightmare, mainly because it doesn't throw on what should be bad configs and things just don't work as expected.
- francislavoie 3y ago
  I don't think that's as true anymore. We've put a lot of effort on adding errors/warnings on bad config. But it's hard to imagine all the "wrong" ways users can try to configure Caddy. If there's something you don't find obvious, please ask us for help on our forums, or open an issue on GitHub if you think it's a bug. Feedback is extremely important for us to be able to improve!
mholt 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Just want to say, it's great for large deployments too! (Ask Stripe and Framer)

drcongo 3y ago

Agree with all of this - Caddy is a great project.

bklyn11201 3y ago

Caddy is indeed wonderful for straightforward and simple projects. There are a number of complex configurations used by larger organizations that are well served today by Nginx Plus, HAProxy, and Traefik that don't seem possible with Caddy. And it's difficult to get a sense of whether the Caddy developers are interested in meeting those more complex use cases or whether they want to keep Caddy smaller and simpler. But yes, by all means, for a simple project pick Caddy!

bosch_mind 3y ago
Can you speak more to usecases that aren’t fulfilled by Caddy? Also, any ideas if performance matches NGINX at scale?
mholt 3y ago
Caddy is more capable and extensible than all those servers, even out of the box. Example: https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/5472#issuecomment-1966563229 https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/5472#issuecomment-... > welcome to 2024. it is shame that traefik cannot handle functionality which can be handled by caddy2. (posted this morning) Anyway, we already do walk up to quite a few complex requirements in large enterprise deployments. Happy to hear about your use case that isn't possible!
- bklyn11201 3y ago
  1) Nginx Plus and HAProxy have nice consoles to view your thousand upstreams and their current health. The Nginx Plus GUI is Apache 2.0 (https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-plus-dashboard https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-plus-dashboard). 2) Nginx has this concept of rewrite "last" (instead of permanent or temporary) 3) Nginx Plus and HAProxy both have TCP routing OOTB without needing to recompile 4) Nginx and Nginx Plus have more ability to intercept a response from an upstream and modify it vs Caddy's fairly limited handle_response {} 5) Modify body content from upstream seems to require a Caddy module 6) Very difficult to find good Caddy configs and thus why LLMs have such a hard-time helping people with Caddy configs. Having a library of configs would probably help this training There seems to be an incredible market opportunity for Caddy as I've lost a lost of trust in the Nginx ecosystem and commercial environment. I would get some of these modules into core Caddy so that they are easy to distribute to people used to just installing via apt. And then attack the Nginx Plus features one by one. Add a visual console even though I understand why it doesn't seem like a necessity. I'd love to see Caddy take share and would love to re-allocate my Nginx Plus spend over to Caddy support.

polishdude20 3y ago

I've used Caddy in the past and it worked well but the syntax for their config caddyfile is just so confusing. I haven't found a tutorial to explain how it all works properly.

mholt 3y ago
We're revamping our docs this year; you can often express what you need in in JSON if it's not elegant in the Caddyfile.
francislavoie 3y ago
We recommend starting here, to understand the structure: https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/concepts https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/concepts Anything in particular you find confusing?
- polishdude20 3y ago
  I don't remember that structure diagram being there back when I used it. Unfortunately I don't remember what I was trying to do anymore.
  - francislavoie 3y ago
    That diagram's been unchanged since our v2.0 release. /shrug

turtlebits 3y ago

I've tried to use Caddy several times (once before the config lang changed and once after). Configuration was a nightmare, mainly because it doesn't throw on what should be bad configs and things just don't work as expected.

francislavoie 3y ago
I don't think that's as true anymore. We've put a lot of effort on adding errors/warnings on bad config. But it's hard to imagine all the "wrong" ways users can try to configure Caddy. If there's something you don't find obvious, please ask us for help on our forums, or open an issue on GitHub if you think it's a bug. Feedback is extremely important for us to be able to improve!

mholt 3y ago

Thanks for the feedback! Just want to say, it's great for large deployments too! (Ask Stripe and Framer)