§2023-12-13
Caddy is a powerful, extensible platform to serve your sites, services, and apps, written in Go. If you're new to Caddy, the way you serve the Web is about to change.
Introduction
Most people use Caddy as a web server or proxy, but at its core, Caddy is a server of servers. With the requisite modules, it can take on the role of any long-running process!
Configuration is both dynamic and exportable with Caddy's API. Although no config files required, you can still use them; most people's favorite way of configuring Caddy is using the Caddyfile. The format of the config document takes many forms with config adapters, but Caddy's native config language is JSON.
Caddy compiles for all major platforms and has no runtime dependencies.
Caddy is a single, self-contained, static binary with zero external dependencies because it's written in Go. These values comprise important parts of the project's vision because they simplify deployment and reduce tedious troubleshooting in production environments.
If there's no dynamic linking, then how can it be extended? Caddy sports a novel plugin architecture that expands its capabilities far beyond that of any other web server, even those with external (dynamically-linked) dependencies.
Our philosophy of "fewer moving parts" ultimately results in more reliable, more manageable, less expensive sites—especially at scale. This semi-technical document describes how we achieve that goal through software engineering.