Meet caddy

Caddy is a web server for your files like Apache, nginx, or lighttpd, but with different goals, features, and advantages.

Note: This software is pre-1.0 and under rapid development. Don't use it in production (yet).

Features

• HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2
• TLS
• FastCGI
• WebSockets
• Markdown
• IPv4 and IPv6 support
• Gzip
• Custom headers
• Logging
• Rewrites
• Redirects
• Multi-core
• • more

Caddy is designed to be super-easy to use and configure. Full documentation coming soon.

Run Caddy in 10 Seconds

1. Run go get github.com/mholt/caddy
2. cd into your website's directory
3. Run caddy (assumes $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH)

Caddy will, by default, serve the current working directory on http://localhost:8080 (the default port will change before version 1.0).

When announced, there will be builds of Caddy available for all platforms.

Configuring Caddy

Use a Caddyfile to configure Caddy. If the current directory has a file called Caddyfile, it will be loaded and parsed and used as configuration. Or you can specify the location of the file using the -conf flag.

A Caddyfile always starts with an address to bind to. The rest of the lines are configuration directives. Here's an example:

mydomain.com:80
gzip
ext .html
header /api Access-Control-Allow-Origin *
browse /files /home/myuser/template.tpl

This simple file enables compression, serves clean URLs, adds the coveted Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header to all requests starting with /api, and enables file browsing in /files using a custom HTML template. Wow! Caddy can do a lot with just a few lines.

Maybe you want to serve both HTTP and HTTPS. You can define multiple (virtual) hosts using curly braces:

mydomain.com:80 {
	gzip
	ext .html
}

mydomain.com:443 {
	tls cert.pem key.pem
}

More documentation and rigorous tests are on their way as this program matures and leaves the experimental phase. Lots of refinements are planned and well on their way to becoming a reality.

Contributing

Please get involved! Before adding a new feature or changing existing behavior, open an issue to discuss it. For non-breaking changes and bug fixes, pull requests are accepted. You can also drop a quick tweet to @mholt6 for quick feedback or comments.

About the project

Caddy was born out of the need for a "batteries-included" web server that runs anywhere and doesn't have to take its configuration with it. Caddy took some inspiration from nginx, lighttpd, Websocketd, and Vagrant, and provides a pleasant mixture of features from each of them. Once announced, Caddy will be suitable for use in both dev and production environments.