Notes on Migrating From Nginx to Caddy

Quic and HTTP3 by default

As of version 2.6, QUIC+HTTP3 is activated by default when running the Caddy server. The protocols can be tuned in the global options block:

{
    servers :443 {
            protocols h1 h2 h3
    }
}

Auto TLS certificates

No more managing Let's encrypt certificates manually. Caddy does everything automatically from provisioning the certificates, to the renewing and revoking.

Built-in tooling

The Caddy binary comes with useful commands out of the box to do several tasks like:

# format and save file in place
caddy fmt --overwrite

caddy hash-password

Dynamic templating

Caddy has a templating system that offers primitives to do things like: dynamically importing HTML pages, markdown rendering, JSON parsing, time and etc

PHP and FastCGI

We can render PHP files by passing it to the FastCGI server with:

asite.com {  
    root * /var/www/a-site
    php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock
    file_server
}

Securing server/paths with basic auth

We can quickly add basic auth by generating the password has with caddy hash-password and then adding the config to the server block with:

asite.com {
    # for /login path or we can remove the path and have it applied for everything
    basicauth /login {
        <username> <hashed-password>
    }

    handle {
        reverse_proxy :8000
    }
}

Reverse-proxying

Doing reverse proxy is as simple as:

a-site {
    reverse_proxy :5031
}

Gotchas