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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to get Caddy more widely deployed at work, and this move is going to alienate commercial customers (at least us) even more than Caddy already does.

Not only do they not have repositories, essentially doubling the effort to keep machines up to date (we have to have one process to upgrade everything else, and one process to upgrade just Caddy), but now we can't even download precompiled binaries to deploy on the servers without paying.

I could have put up with Caddy not being as mature as nginx for some low-volume deployments, and barely put up with the lack of debs, but having to compile my own binaries across the company isn't worth the integrated TLS certs.

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> Not only do they not have repositories, essentially doubling the effort to keep machines up to date (we have to have one process to upgrade everything else, and one process to upgrade just Caddy)

Cory's working on this, actually. If we can get it working, we should be able to offer official Caddy packages to all our customers, customized just how they need it to be, so your 'apt upgrade' could upgrade Caddy as well, with just the plugins you want.

> I could have put up with Caddy not being as mature as nginx for some low-volume deployments, and barely put up with the lack of debs, but having to compile my own binaries across the company isn't worth the integrated TLS certs.

Until we have official apt repos, you're welcome to use getcaddy.com which automates builds and installations of Caddy. True, it's not "apt install" but it's pretty close, until we can get apt repos and others available.

> True, it's not "apt install" but it's pretty close

I feel like maybe you don't know what apt does, or how it's used, if you think that shell script is "pretty close."

> it's not "apt install" but it's pretty close

It's not close, though, it's very far. With apt, I know things are going to go in their proper place, and are going to get cleaned up afterwards (not to mention the biggest benefit, automatic updates).

With a shell script, I don't know what sort of stuff it puts where on my filesystem, and I can't automate the installation easily. My preferred order of installation procedures is: "apt", "manual", and "random shell script" is a distant last, to the point where I sometimes won't try software if the installation procedure isn't sane.

My thoughts exactly. And I am afraid we are moving even further away from packages with this move..

Yeah... What I don't understand is why nginx doesn't have built-in LetsEncrypt cert fetching yet.

After this I would bet they have it before very long.

You assume that they care about Caddy and that the 9 lines of how to get LE for nginx is something they think it's hard to do for anyone that can't follow these instructions: https://gist.github.com/cecilemuller/a26737699a7e70a7093d4dc... or use: https://github.com/certbot/certbot

Separation of concerns (serving http/s content and registering/renewing tls certificates) is a feature. Combining them is an appeasement for devs who think they don't need ops.

caddy wants $1200 a year minimum, for 2 instances. For $1200 I'll give you a setup script for HAProxy/Certbot that will work on infinite servers, and will keep working next year without you paying me.

This is like the weird "SaaS all the things" model taken to the extreme.

Caddy performs worse, has crazy defaults (seriously, won't start when LetsEncrypt is down!?) and wants to charge you FOREVER to use their build service, even if you only use it once and never update.

So, tell me again who their target market is?

> True, it's not "apt install"

And I guess it'll never enter Debian/main now, unless a maintainer forks it in order to build Free binaries :/

Given the .. unusual... plugin module (compile one caddy build per plugin-set x arch combo), I don't see ohw that could possibly translate into proper apt/whatever packages.

If, during the install, it's compiling caddy, that's probably not what people want.

How will it actually work, given plugins are determined at build-time and there's a phenomenally large matrix of plugin X arch combos?

You forget that these are the same developers who thought it makes sense to refuse to start with a cached,valid tls certificate because LE's ACME API was unavailable.

Of course they'll do something user hostile and ass backwards!

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