caddy

a project

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Every site on HTTPS

Caddy is an extensible server platform that uses TLS by default.

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• Features
• Install
• Build from source
  • For development
  • With version information and/or plugins
• Quick start
• Overview
• Full documentation
• Getting help
• About

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
  • ZeroSSL and Let's Encrypt for public names
  • Fully-managed local CA for internal names & IPs
  • Can coordinate with other Caddy instances in a cluster
  • Multi-issuer fallback
  • Encrypted ClientHello (ECH) support
• Stays up when other servers go down due to TLS/OCSP/certificate-related issues
• Production-ready after serving trillions of requests and managing millions of TLS certificates
• Scales to hundreds of thousands of sites as proven in production
• HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3 all supported by default
• Highly extensible modular architecture lets Caddy do anything without bloat
• Runs anywhere with no external dependencies (not even libc)
• Written in Go, a language with higher memory safety guarantees than other servers
• Actually fun to use
• So much more to discover

Install

The simplest, cross-platform way to get started is to download Caddy from GitHub Releases and place the executable file in your PATH.

See our online documentation for other install instructions.

Build from source

Requirements:

• Go 1.25.0 or newer

For development

Note: These steps will not embed proper version information. For that, please follow the instructions in the next section.

$ git clone "https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy.git"
$ cd caddy/cmd/caddy/
$ go build

When you run Caddy, it may try to bind to low ports unless otherwise specified in your config. If your OS requires elevated privileges for this, you will need to give your new binary permission to do so. On Linux, this can be done easily with: sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep ./caddy

If you prefer to use go run which only creates temporary binaries, you can still do this with the included setcap.sh like so:

$ go run -exec ./setcap.sh main.go

If you don't want to type your password for setcap, use sudo visudo to edit your sudoers file and allow your user account to run that command without a password, for example:

username ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/setcap

replacing username with your actual username. Please be careful and only do this if you know what you are doing! We are only qualified to document how to use Caddy, not Go tooling or your computer, and we are providing these instructions for convenience only; please learn how to use your own computer at your own risk and make any needful adjustments.

Then you can run the tests in all modules or a specific one:

$ go test ./...
$ go test ./modules/caddyhttp/tracing/

With version information and/or plugins

Using our builder tool, xcaddy...

$ xcaddy build

...the following steps are automated:

1. Create a new folder: mkdir caddy
2. Change into it: cd caddy
3. Copy Caddy's main.go into the empty folder. Add imports for any custom plugins you want to add.
4. Initialize a Go module: go mod init caddy
5. (Optional) Pin Caddy version: go get github.com/caddyserver/caddy/v2@version replacing version with a git tag, commit, or branch name.
6. (Optional) Add plugins by adding their import: _ "import/path/here"
7. Compile: go build -tags=nobadger,nomysql,nopgx

Quick start

The Caddy website has documentation that includes tutorials, quick-start guides, reference, and more.