Show HN: Caddy 2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#21

Post by gnalck » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

mholt wrote: post #14

Hi HN -- this is what I've been working on for the last 14 months, with the help of many contributors and the backing of several sponsors. (Thank You!) Caddy 2 is a fresh new server experience. Some things might take getting used to, like having every site served over HTTPS unless you specify http:// explicitly in your config. But in general, it will feel familiar to v1 in a lot of ways. If you've used v1 before, I r…

Hey Matt - thanks for creating and maintaining Caddy all these years! Like others have said in this thread, it is so easy to set up and maintain that it really does feel like "magic".

In terms of speeding up adoption of Caddy 2, it may be useful to have a list somewhere of the concrete improvements between the two (as I'm sure there are many). A (very) brief look and search around only yielded this article[1] which referenced another link of improvements that now 404s[2].

Cheers,

[1] https://caddyserver.com/v1/blog/caddy-2-ready-for-developers

[2] https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/tree/v2#list-of-improve...

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#22

Post by danogentili » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

I started using caddy v1 thanks to lightning-fast and simple TLS setup and extremely simple configuration in general, thanks to the excellent docs and handy plugins for common stuff like cors, rewrites and fastcgi.

Shortly after upgrading to caddy v2, I switched to nginx, after spending way too much time trying to make sense of the new Caddyfile and docs (the thing I miss the most of the docs is the plugin list, along with the cors plugin, and in general the non-existant entry curve of Caddy v1). Tbh, I also miss the one-liner install script I'm genuinely sorry for the project; I didn't mind at all any of the previous so-called shady behavior (I personally don't object at all against a developer trying to make a living out of his own open-source project); I've been using caddy for four years now, and I really hope to switch back to it, one day.

Thank you for your work, mholt! <3

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#23

Post by francislavoie » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

danogentili wrote: post #22

I started using caddy v1 thanks to lightning-fast and simple TLS setup and extremely simple configuration in general, thanks to the excellent docs and handy plugins for common stuff like cors, rewrites and fastcgi. Shortly after upgrading to caddy v2, I switched to nginx, after spending way too much time trying to make sense of the new Caddyfile and docs (the thing I miss the most of the docs is the plugin list, alon…

If you need any help when coming back to Caddy v2, come ask for help on the community forums: https://caddy.community/

We'll be glad to help you get set up!

The docs are still a work in progress, we'll eventually have a plugin registry like in v1 but that requires a bunch of work behind the scenes to make it happen.

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#24

Post by BilalBudhani » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

I have been using Caddy v1 for more than a year now as a web server for some of my production sites. I'm really happy with the simplicity of it and especially out of the box SSL support with LetsEncrypt. I believe with v2 I will be moving more of my sites to Caddy. Thank you for all the hard work :)

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#25

Post by mholt » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

xrisk wrote: post #19

Slightly disappointed because they changed the Caddyfile syntax. I think it's a bit more verbose now, compared to v1.

Some parameters might have one or two more words to type, but the growth in flexibility is enormous, and we felt it was worth the tradeoff. You can see a comparison here: https://caddyserver.com/docs/v2-upgrade#caddyfile

We also think slightly more verbosity in the v2 Caddyfile is actually a good thing. Aside from more flexibility, it makes it a little clearer what's going on, and concerns are better separated.

For example, the reverse proxy is no longer in the business of rewriting requests: there are other directives for that.

In fact, we completely got rid of "rewrite hacks" that involved appending path components to the URI so they could be routed, then needing to strip those before proxying.

Request matching is very powerful in Caddy 2: you can still easily match on paths in-line with your handler directives, but you can also match on any other part of the request (client IP, query string, regular expressions, etc) with an intuitive @-block syntax: https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/matchers

Anyway, I think you'll feel right at home with it after a while. I've been using it for months now and it's so simple overall.

(I also use the JSON config directly on a couple of my servers, where the behavior I need to express is way more elegant and concise than in the Caddyfile.)

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#26

Post by mholt » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

narrationbox wrote: post #18

sqs wrote: post #2

Awesome! We use Caddy at Sourcegraph ( https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=caddy+repo:%5Egithub%5C.com... ) and love it. Caddy makes it much easier to run our app in local dev (with HTTPS and other nice things).

Same here! We are huge fans of Caddy at Narration Box ( https://narrationbox.com ) and we are considering replacing NGINX completely in our Django production stack. (Currently we only use Caddy for development and staging) The author of Caddy, Matt Holt, is a really great person and is extremely responsive on Twitter and GitHub. Highly recommend checking them out.

Thank you for your feedback and support!

I haven't actually heard of Narration Box before now, but it looks fantastic!

I'm also a huge fan of Sourcegraph (@sqs if you're reading this!) -- which has really helped Caddy get to this point.

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#27

Post by mholt » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

gnalck wrote: post #21

mholt wrote: post #14

Hi HN -- this is what I've been working on for the last 14 months, with the help of many contributors and the backing of several sponsors. (Thank You!) Caddy 2 is a fresh new server experience. Some things might take getting used to, like having every site served over HTTPS unless you specify http:// explicitly in your config. But in general, it will feel familiar to v1 in a lot of ways. If you've used v1 before, I r…

Hey Matt - thanks for creating and maintaining Caddy all these years! Like others have said in this thread, it is so easy to set up and maintain that it really does feel like "magic". In terms of speeding up adoption of Caddy 2, it may be useful to have a list somewhere of the concrete improvements between the two (as I'm sure there are many). A (very) brief look and search around only yielded this article[1] which r…

Thanks for the feedback! Glad you have had a good experience with it.

That blog post is pretty old. We do have a current upgrade guide here in our docs: https://caddyserver.com/docs/v2-upgrade

We also have a (sort of deprecated) wiki with some (slightly outdated) high-level improvements listed: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/wiki/v2:-Improvements

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#28

Post by hairyhenderson » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

schoolornot wrote: post #13

I somewhat remember the Caddy team having a history of shady behavior: advertisements in headers, hostility towards contributors, telemetry you have to opt-out of. Has any of this changed or has it become worse?

Matt's already spoken to the ads/telemetry (which are ancient history).

My experience as a contributor has been nothing but positive. But if anyone's had a bad experience, I'm sure the Caddy team is more than willing to talk it out and reconcile.

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#29

Post by xrisk » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

mholt wrote: post #25

xrisk wrote: post #19

Slightly disappointed because they changed the Caddyfile syntax. I think it's a bit more verbose now, compared to v1.

Some parameters might have one or two more words to type, but the growth in flexibility is enormous, and we felt it was worth the tradeoff. You can see a comparison here: https://caddyserver.com/docs/v2-upgrade#caddyfile We also think slightly more verbosity in the v2 Caddyfile is actually a good thing. Aside from more flexibility, it makes it a little clearer what's going on, and concerns are better separated. For e…

Thanks for the response! Looking forward to upgrade my stuff. Is there a reason why you decided to introduce an entirely new configuration method via JSON?

Re: Show HN: Caddy 2

#30

Post by mholt » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

BilalBudhani wrote: post #24

I have been using Caddy v1 for more than a year now as a web server for some of my production sites. I'm really happy with the simplicity of it and especially out of the box SSL support with LetsEncrypt. I believe with v2 I will be moving more of my sites to Caddy. Thank you for all the hard work :)

Thank you for sharing your experience. Glad to hear it. Feel free to join our forums and be a part of the community! https://caddy.community - could always use more people with experience helping out. :)