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Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

caddyserver.com

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Re: Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

#31

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Hamcha wrote: post #19

I'm an avid user of Caddy but I think the more time it passes and the more opinionated it gets, the worse it becomes overall. I don't object to highly opinionated takes but when your biggest selling point is how neat the configuration is to write it becomes more of a pain when it just isn't anymore. Two examples from my experience upgrading from Caddy 1 to Caddy 2: Ex.1: Caddy 1 by default bound to an arbitrary port…

I dunno, I appreciate that they're not optimizing for your usecase, but I think their defaults do in fact make sense for the majority of users they're targeting. And yes, that means that if you're trying to use it for something different and/or you want a lot of tweaking you might be better off with something else.

Re: Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

#32

Post by tiffanyh »

What makes Caddy setup of Lets Encrypt so much easier?

I frequently hear that being a huge reason for Caddy use but looking at the documentation for NGINX [0] and Caddy [1], it doesn't seem to be much different.

[0] https://www.nginx.com/blog/using-free-ssltls-certificates-fr...

[1] https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https

Re: Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

#33

Post by vxNsr »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #30
mholt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your performance requirements?

This is exactly what the original complaint was: Someone complains that Caddy is slower than the options, and the official response is not neither agreement nor giving data to show that Caddy is fast, but equivocating about whether it matters while avoiding commenting on whether the claim is true. If you want to ship a webserver that's slower but safer and easy to use, that's fine ; I'm using Caddy to host my stuff b…

just fyi, based on the bio of the person you're replying to, they're the author of caddy. not sure if this was known or not

Re: Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

#35

Post by nullwarp »

tiffanyh wrote: post #32

What makes Caddy setup of Lets Encrypt so much easier? I frequently hear that being a huge reason for Caddy use but looking at the documentation for NGINX [0] and Caddy [1], it doesn't seem to be much different. [0] https://www.nginx.com/blog/using-free-ssltls-certificates-fr... [1] https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https

It has no third party tool required

Re: Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

#36

Post by mholt »

tiffanyh wrote: post #32

What makes Caddy setup of Lets Encrypt so much easier? I frequently hear that being a huge reason for Caddy use but looking at the documentation for NGINX [0] and Caddy [1], it doesn't seem to be much different. [0] https://www.nginx.com/blog/using-free-ssltls-certificates-fr... [1] https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https

NGINX requires external tooling (e.g. certbot), Caddy's auto-HTTPS is built-in. Caddy's auto-HTTPS logic is much smarter and more robust than certbot or any other ACME client. In general, Caddy sites stay up when other sites will go down due to HTTPS/certificate issues. Certbot+cron is much more brittle than Caddy's embedded handling of certificates. Plus, Caddy has stronger memory safety guarantees than a C program like NGINX.

Caddy automatically staples and caches OCSP responses by default, as well. OCSP responder outages? No problem. This sometimes brings sites down (esp. Must-Staple certs in Firefox) because other servers' OCSP stapling implementations are not as robust. I remember when gnu.org went down for a while because of this.

Certificate got revoked? No problem, Caddy will automatically detect that via OCSP and replace it for you.

Internal throttling and retry logic makes it more resilient to domain validation problems. Caddy will fall back to a secondary CA if your first CA is having trouble issuing a certificate (i.e. multiple default CAs). Not to mention, when using Let's Encrypt, Caddy will retry with its staging endpoint to help avoid rate limit issues.

Plus, deploy multiple Caddy instances as a cluster and they will automatically share and coordinate management of certificates and OCSP staples. (Doing this is as simple as configuring each Caddy instance to use the same storage backend.)

It's very quick to get started and try out HTTPS: https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/https

Re: Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

#37

Post by PragmaticPulp »

mholt wrote: post #27
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are your performance requirements? If the requirements were such that web server performance didn’t matter, I wouldn’t care and wouldn’t be asking about it. But the problem is that it doesn’t make sense to hide the performance statistics and then debate each user’s performance requirements instead of just letting the performance be a known quantity so we can all decide for ourselves.

We aren't "hiding" any performance stats. They just don't exist. It's super hard to generate them in a way that applies perfectly to everyone's use case. I'm still waiting to hear your performance requirements btw.

> I'm still waiting to hear your performance requirements btw.

I suppose this encapsulates why I get turned off of Caddy every time I look into it: Basic concerns (including questions about approximate performance) are met with suggestions that I don’t know what I want and therefore I’m not qualified to make such judgments.

Re: Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

#38

Post by mholt »

vxNsr wrote: post #33
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what the original complaint was: Someone complains that Caddy is slower than the options, and the official response is not neither agreement nor giving data to show that Caddy is fast, but equivocating about whether it matters while avoiding commenting on whether the claim is true. If you want to ship a webserver that's slower but safer and easy to use, that's fine ; I'm using Caddy to host my stuff b…

just fyi, based on the bio of the person you're replying to, they're the author of caddy. not sure if this was known or not

Yeah, it's hard for us to hit a performance target that is being kept hidden from the devs.

Re: Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

#39

Post by pachico »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #11

I love what the Caddy project is doing, but every time I look into it I can’t get a straight answer about performance. One of the top search results for Caddy performance is this Caddy forum thread with a response from the Caddy author: https://caddy.community/t/performance-compared-to-nginx/7993 But it seems to be dodging the question and linking to the most misleading possible Tweets instead of providing any actual…

Can't think of any situations I was involved where the bottleneck was the http server app rather than the application behind it. Am I the only one?

Re: Caddy – Open-source web server with automatic HTTPS

#40

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

vxNsr wrote: post #33
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what the original complaint was: Someone complains that Caddy is slower than the options, and the official response is not neither agreement nor giving data to show that Caddy is fast, but equivocating about whether it matters while avoiding commenting on whether the claim is true. If you want to ship a webserver that's slower but safer and easy to use, that's fine ; I'm using Caddy to host my stuff b…

just fyi, based on the bio of the person you're replying to, they're the author of caddy. not sure if this was known or not

Yes, that's why I am treating that comment as an official response.
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