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Comment by miohtama | Hacker News Reader

My web server path has been Apache -> (Varnish) -> Nginx -> Caddy. This outside programming language specific servers like Waitress or Express.js.

I love the fact that Caddy is a single binary I can run for simple use cases without configuration file. Plus the built-in Let’s Encrypt support. Nginx is definitely on defence here unless you need “web scale” servers.

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Yeah Caddy's developer experience is unrivaled when it comes to setting up SSL. You don't have to run Certbot or manage certificates manually. If you give it a hostname to proxy to, it just handles certificate management seamlessly in the background.

The real killer feature for me is the Cloudflare module. It allows you to use the acme DNS challenge, which means you can test your SSL setup without exposing your server to the public internet.

certbot has dns plugin for nearly all DNS providers including Route53 and Cloudflare. I have been using LE certs on the nginx server on my developer environment without any issues ,other can copying over the certs.

Certbot is fine, but it’s nice to have that functionality built directly into the reverse proxy as opposed to having to configure and update multiple tools. I would ideally like to see Nginx integrate a subset of Certbot’s feature set into their code base especially given that offloading SSL is one of the primary use cases of Nginx.

To clarify, Caddy absolutely can deal "web scale" as proven by companies like Fathom, Stripe, and many others. (The Go standard library powers many of Google's, Cloudflare's, and Netflix's infrastructure, and Caddy is a relatively thin wrapper over that.)

Also a huge fan of Caddy!!!

Such a smart design and incredibly useful piece of software!

But since we're replying to a comment that's criticial about Nginx's commercialization: Caddy also tried to commercialize, and for some time they got way more criticism for that. Are those concerns no longer applicable?

Yes, no longer applicable. https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2786

Why do you have so many reverse proxies hooked up to each other? Specially Apache and Nginx? I suppose you're using Caddy for its LetsEncrypt support?

They're talking about a timeline of products that they've used. Not an architecture.

Oh. Ok. Thanks

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