Comment by Hamcha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hamcha | Hacker News Reader

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 and served via HTTP, they now default to HTTPS, which doesn't work for me since I use traefik in front of it. Bypassing this means adding a ugly ":80" in front of every single vhost I have (which is 20+), before it was just about adding "ssl" if I wanted HTTPS.

Ex.2: The reverse proxy is now transparent by default, in Caddy 1 it wasn't and you just added a "transparent" flag if you wanted it, but now you can't opt out of it and you have to manually specify every header in the config.

I don't think my use-case is that unusual (file server behind edge router) and yet I feel like I have to work against Caddy every so many steps of the way, at one point I will have to ask myself how much more work would it take to just go back to nginx instead.

Thanks for the feedback.

> when your biggest selling point is how neat the configuration is to write

To clarify, neat/easy configuration isn't our biggest selling point in v2. Flexible configuration is (one of them, anyway). Marketing an advanced web server as "easy" was a mistake in hindsight, so we don't do that anymore.

As for your use case, understandably it's slightly more tedious to do what you're trying to do. However, in our experience in helping hundreds of users in the forums and from what we see in issues, transparent proxy was the more common use case by far, and disabling that is usually as simple as setting the Host header to the address of the upstream. And we feel that enabling HTTPS universally is easier to understand than only enabling HTTPS for some hosts, and we made sure it's easy to disable when necessary.

(Most people just use Caddy, rather than proxying to it from other servers like Traefik, since Caddy can fit those use cases as well, especially with this plugin: https://github.com/lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy)

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.

To be fair, HTTPS by default makes perfect sense for a server. Of course the more complex the setup, the more you’re going against the defaults. It’s impossible to have defaults that work for everyone, so they chose the most common/desirable/sellable default.

I'd argue that HTTPS by default makes perfect sense for a _public facing_ server. For something on an internal network it doesn't make as much sense, especially since that makes using the default path for getting certificates difficult (can't get certs if you don't have DNS).

I think what I'm trying to say is that Caddy was initially great for me (serving static files on the local network by IP address as an easy way to transfer files), but hasn't been that for ages.

FWIW, Caddy can act as its own CA, so it can issue certs for any private site, and you can add the root CA cert to any machines necessary.

> but hasn't been that for ages

Huh? It still is. This is all you need:

    :80 {
        root * /path/to/files
        file_server
    }

Or without a config file, simply:

    $ caddy file-server --root /path/to/files

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