Caddy, quietly doing the work

The best infrastructure is the kind you forget you installed.

What it does for me

I don't run anything heroic. A few static sites, one or two small services behind a reverse proxy, the occasional weekend toy. Caddy gives me HTTPS without me ever typing the word certbot, a config file that reads like English, and an HTTP/3 endpoint I didn't have to configure on purpose.

The whole config, mostly

ellis-wren.example {
    root * /var/www/ellis
    file_server
    encode zstd gzip
}

notes.example {
    reverse_proxy localhost:8081
}

That's the file. There is no second file. I don't have a separate certificate renewal cron. I don't have a separate nginx-to-LE bridge. The thing that used to take me a Saturday afternoon — getting a small site online with a green padlock — now takes a caddy reload.

What I don't love

• The JSON config API is powerful, but I've never needed it; the Caddyfile is enough for my scale and I worry the JSON path will quietly eat the documentation.
• Some niche modules live in third-party builds, which means I sometimes need to remember which binary I'm running.
• Compared to nginx, there's less Stack Overflow to fall into when something is weird — but there's also been less weird, so it evens out.

Boring software is a feature, not a confession.

— something I muttered while another auto-renewal silently succeeded