HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
caddyserver
caddy
Go2015–2026
caddyserver / caddy

caddy

Fast and extensible multi-platform HTTP/1-2-3 web server with automatic HTTPS

120Distinct people
214Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
79KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Fast and extensible multi-platform HTTP/1-2-3 web server with automatic HTTPS

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Hmm, went into this article skeptical, but came out agreeing with it more than I expected. Makes some excellent points, and highlights some real challenges of the ecosystem.…

mholt used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year214 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-04-28 15:00:32 UTC to 2026-10-06 13:28:50 UTC.

0102030402015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 40 mentions; 2 submissions, 38 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 22 mentions; 4 submissions, 18 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 28 mentions; 3 submissions, 25 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 3 submissions, 8 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 36 mentions; 4 submissions, 32 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 1 submissions, 20 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 1 submissions, 12 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 2 submissions, 7 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC40238
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC22418
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC28325
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1138
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC36432
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21120
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13112
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC927
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
a project Every site on HTTPS Caddy is an extensible server platform that uses TLS by default. Releases · Documentation · Get Help           Powered by Special thanks to: Warp, built for coding with multiple AI agents Available for MacOS, Linux, & Windows Menu 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 1.26.0 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: Create a new folder: mkdir caddy Change into it: cd caddy Copy Caddy's main.go into the empty folder. Add imports for any custom plugins you want to add. Initialize a Go module: go mod init caddy (Optional) Pin Caddy version: go get github.com/caddyserver/caddy/v2@version replacing version with a git tag, commit, or branch name. (Optional) Add plugins by adding their import: _ "import/path/here" Compile: go build -tags=nobadger,nomysql,nopgx Quick start The Caddy website has documentation that includes tutorials, quick-start guides, reference, and more. We recommend that all users -- regardless of experience level -- do our Getting Started guide to become familiar with using Caddy. If you've only got a minute, the website has several quick-start tutorials to choose from! However, after finishing a quick-start tutorial, please read more documentation to understand how the software works. 🙂 Overview Caddy is most often used as an HTTPS server, but it is suitable for any long-running Go program. First and foremost, it is a platform to run Go applications. Caddy "apps" are just Go programs that are implemented as Caddy modules. Two apps -- tls and http -- ship standard with Caddy. Caddy apps instantly benefit from automated documentation, graceful on-line config changes via API, and unification with other Caddy apps. Although JSON is Caddy's native config language, Caddy can accept input from config adapters which can essentially convert any config format of your choice into JSON: Caddyfile, JSON 5, YAML, TOML, NGINX config, and more. The primary way to configure Caddy is through its API, but if you prefer config files, the command-line interface supports those too. Caddy exposes an unprecedented level of control compared to any web server in existence. In Caddy, you are usually setting the actual values of the initialized types in memory that power everything from your HTTP handlers and TLS handshakes to your storage medium. Caddy is also ridiculously extensible, with a powerful plugin system that makes vast improvements over other web servers. To wield the power of this design, you need to know how the config document is structured. Please see our documentation site for details about Caddy's config structure. Nearly all of Caddy's configuration is contained in a single config document, rather than being scattered across CLI flags and env variables and a configuration file as with other web servers. This makes managing your server config more straightforward and reduces hidden variables/factors. Full documentation Our website has complete documentation: https://caddyserver.com/docs/ The docs are also open source. You can contribute to them here: https://github.com/caddyserver/website Getting help We advise companies using Caddy to
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

13 sources
I would just like to take this opportunity to complain about Windows file paths and especially parsing them in cross-platform software like a web server that joins request paths that always use / to Windows filepath roots that may or may not use \. I also hate that Windows paths are limited to 260 characters !? Seriously, in Caddy, I have some of the most bizarre special code paths for Windows. For example: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/blob/c6eb186064091c79f4... Can someone who understands and appreciates the way Windows does files please help me appreciate it too? This article did not help me have gratitude for Windows: https://www.fileside.app/blog/2023-03-17_windows-file-paths/ > we realise that we can construct an almost unlimited number of different path strings that all refer to the same directory. :o
In Why does Windows use backslash as path separator? (2019)
I haven't read the content of the patches to understand the impact of the bugs, but from my own experience [0] I can suggest a few reasons: - CVEs are gold to researchers and organizations like citations are to academics. In this case, the CVEs were filed based on "policy" but it's unclear if they are just adding noise to the DB. - The severity of the bug is not as severe as greater powers-that-be would like to think (again, they see it as doing due diligence; developers who know the ins and outs might see it as an overreaction). - Bug is in an experimental feature. I'm not saying one way is right or not in this case, just pointing out my experience has generally been that CVEs are kind of broken in general... [0]: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/4775
In Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork
I think you mixed up what year we're now :). Caddy 2.6.2 October 13, 2022 so it's been not 3 but 15 months since release. Even more relevantly, HTTP/3 was first supported out of the box in 2.6.0 - released Sep 20, 2022. Even if 2.6.2 had been just 3 months old that it's from the first 22 days of having HTTP/3 support out of the box instead of the versions from the following 3 months would definitely be relevant criticism to note. https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases?page=2
In Curl HTTP/3 Performance
> I’m not aware of anyone running Caddy at any sort of scale for customers. Well, to name a few... - Stripe (https://twitter.com/caddyserver/status/1559591673511813120) - Mercedes-Benz (https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/pull/5275#issuecomment-...) - Approximated.app (https://dev.to/carterbryden/how-to-allow-end-user-custom-dom...) - FusionAuth (https://fusionauth.io/blog/unlimited-domains-fusionauth) The problem is those using Caddy are shy, not that it's not used at all. I know this because I see users removing the `server` header on the Caddy forum all the time, and many of the large users are just shy of their technology stack when it comes to Caddy. Disclaimer: Member of the Caddy team
In I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol' Nginx

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.