Caddy (web server)

Website

Caddy is a webserver which is much simpler to configure than Apache and is supposedly just as fast as nginx. It handles HTTPS automatically and can be used as a reverse proxy or load balancer.

Advantages of Caddy:

Much simpler configuration with sane defaults (e.g. no directory listing).
Automatic HTTPS (redirect, public certificates, self-signed certificates)
Automatic HTTP/2

This article is about Caddy v2.

Note that caddy does not support .htaccess which is only supported in Apache.

Caddyfile

Reverse Proxy

Just use the reverse_proxy directive.
By default, this will automatically preserve headers.
Things like websockets will work automatically.

gitlab.example.com {
  encode zstd gzip
  reverse_proxy localhost:8001
}

To HTTPS

If you are reverse proxying to another HTTPS, you may need to specify the SNI as follows:

dev2.davidl.me {
  reverse_proxy https://192.168.1.41 {
    transport http {
      tls_server_name dev2.davidl.me
    }
  }
}

Try this if you get 502 errors.

PHP

Install php-fpm
Modify /etc/php/7.4/fpm/pool.d/www.conf to listen on a socket (e.g. 9000)

example.com {
  root * /var/www/wordpress
  encode zstd gzip
  php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php-version-fpm.sock
  file_server
}

Notes

If you prefer to use a UNIX socket, you can use php_fastcgi unix//var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock

HTTP3

Add the following to your Caddyfile:

{ 
  servers {
    protocol {
      experimental_http3
    }
  }
}