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Switching to Caddy

I decided to upgrade my ancient Fedora 25 VPS to Fedora 33 this weekend. I couldn’t get the in-place upgrade to work across so many releases so I just blew away the entire server and started fresh. While typing away, I remembered I had heard some good stuff about Caddy. I was also getting annoyed manually refreshing my Let’s Encrypt certs every three months for lighttpd. I figured why not give Caddy a try?

Turns out caddy is a joy compared to lighttpd. Compare my old lighttpd notes to the new caddy config:

lighttpd:

Caddyfile:

dxuuu.xyz

root * /var/www/dxuuu.xyz
file_server

And caddy automatically renews https certs!

One final note: I originally chose lighttpd out of resource concerns b/c I’m running this site on a $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet. A brief inspection reveals caddy is doing just fine:

[dxu@shiva ~]$ systemctl status caddy
● caddy.service - Caddy web server
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/caddy.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
     Active: active (running) since Sat 2021-03-20 21:53:36 UTC; 12min ago
       Docs: https://caddyserver.com/docs/
    Process: 6395 ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile (code=exited, status=>
   Main PID: 6401 (caddy)
      Tasks: 7 (limit: 1125)
     Memory: 29.1M
        CPU: 227ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/caddy.service
             └─6401 /usr/bin/caddy run --environ --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile