Caddy is a powerful, extensible web server to serve your sites, services, and apps. It offers automatic HTTPS.
The web server is notable for its automatic TLS certificate obtainment and renewal, and significantly smaller configuration files than Apache or Nginx.
Caddy is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Easy configuration with the Caddyfile.
- Powerful configuration with its native JSON config.
- Dynamic configuration with the JSON API.
- Config adapters if you don’t like JSON.
- Automatic HTTPS by default:
- Let’s Encrypt for public sites.
- Fully-managed local CA for internal names & IPs.
- Can coordinate with other Caddy instances in a cluster.
- Stays up when other servers go down due to TLS/OCSP/certificate-related issues.
- HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and experimental HTTP/3 support.
- Markdown rendering.
- CGI via WebSockets.
- Gzip compression.
- Basic access authentication.
- URL rewriting.
- Redirects.
- File browsing.
- Access, error, and process logs.
- IPv6.
- Experimental QUIC support. QUIC is a general-purpose transport layer network protocol.
- Highly extensible modular architecture lets Caddy do anything without bloat. There’s a powerful plugin system.
- Runs anywhere with no external dependencies (not even libc).
- Caddy’s native config language is JSON.
- Besides functioning as a web server, Caddy also acts as a:
- reverse proxy.
- sidecar proxy.
- load balancer.
- API gateway.
- ingress controller.
- system manager.
- process supervisor.
- task scheduler.
- (any long-running Go program).
- Cross-platform support – statically-compiled binaries for Linux, Android, BSD, Mac, and Windows on i386, amd64, and ARM architectures.
Website: caddyserver.com
Support: Documentation, Installation Document, Forum, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Matthew Holt, Light Code Labs, Ardan Labs
License: Apache License 2.0
Caddy is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Web Servers | |
|---|---|
| nginx | Very powerful and efficient web server powering the top web sites |
| Apache | Like nginx, Apache is a hugely popular web server |
| Caddy | Powerful, enterprise-ready web server written in Go |
| Lwan | Experimental, scalable, high performance HTTP server |
| H2O | Optimized HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 server |
| Tengine | Distribution of nginx |
| lighttpd | Fast, compliant and very flexible low memory footprint web server |
| Ferron | Web server optimized for speed, security and efficiency |
| Angie | Scalable web server that was forked from nginx |
| Algernon | Small self-contained pure-Go web server |
| Node.js | Server-side JavaScript environment for network applications |
| Hiawatha | Web server that focuses on security |
| OpenLiteSpeed | Lightweight HTTP server |
| rwasa | Full-featured high performance web server |
| devd | Local web server for developers |
| Cherokee | Fast, flexible and embeddable web server |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |