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. Don't use it in production (yet).

Features

• TLS
• FastCGI (mostly for PHP sites)
• WebSockets
• IPv4 and IPv6 support
• Gzip
• Custom headers
• Logging
• Rewrites
• Redirects
• Multi-core
• • more

Caddy is designed to be super-easy to use and configure.

Run Caddy

1. Download or build it
2. cd into a directory you want to serve
3. ./caddy

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

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.

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 *

This simple file enables gzip compression, serves clean URLs, and adds the coveted Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header to all requests starting with /api. Wow! Caddy can do a lot with just four 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
	header /api Access-Control-Allow-Origin *
}

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

For more details, including which directives you can use to configure Caddy, see the wiki.

Better documentation (and rigorous tests) are on their way as the program matures and leaves the experimental phase.

Contributing

Please get involved! Before adding a new feature or changing existing behavior, open an issue to discuss it. For other 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 lightweight but configurable web server that didn't have to be "installed" and was readily available for any platform. Caddy took some inspiration from nginx, lighttpd, Websocketd, and Vagrant, and provides a pleasant mixture of the handy features from each of them. Caddy is suitable for use in both dev and production environments.