Getting started with Caddy

May 14, 2020

(Originally posted on 2017-12-01 on Medium.) (warning: This article is about v1. A v2 equivalent coming soon!)

Recently I’ve been enjoying using Caddy web server to get automatic-HTTPS websites. I took the time to package it for Fedora and CentOS/RHEL to make it more accessible and more maintainable. This guide demonstrates how to use those packages.

Preparation

In order for Caddy to provision your Let’s Encrypt certificates as soon as it starts, you will need two things configured beforehand.

a DNS record pointing your domain to your server’s IP address
port 80 allowed for the ACME HTTP challenge

Since you’ll need port 443 open later anyways, just go ahead and open both now.

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=http --add-service=https
firewall-cmd --reload

For the rest of the guide, make sure you replace example.com with the actual domain name you want to use.

Installation

CentOS and RHEL (make sure EPEL is enabled first):

yum install caddy

Fedora:

dnf install caddy

Content

Put your own content in /var/www/example.com, or use this example index file to get started now and swap in your own content later.

mkdir -p /var/www/example.com
echo '<h1>Hello world!</h1>' > /var/www/example.com/index.html

If you care about selinux (you should), restore the file context for your content files and directories.

restorecon -r /var/www

Configuration

Create a Caddyfile as /etc/caddy/conf.d/example.com.conf. Files in /etc/caddy/conf.d ending in .conf will be automatically imported by the global Caddyfile /etc/caddy/caddy.conf, which in turn is read by the systemd service unit.

example.com {
    root /var/www/example.com
}

Service

Enable and start the Caddy daemon.

systemctl enable --now caddy

Conclusion

You should now be able to open https://example.com in your browser and view your content.