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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

So it's mod_php for Caddy, in reverse?

The traditional idea is to build a plug-in for the parent webserver. By essentially "making a fork" of Caddy, if you want to add other plugins to Caddy and then incorporate them into FrankenPHP, it's a lot more work. If instead you ship a PHP plugin to Caddy, you can manage Caddy instead and mix and match different functionality in one place.

But I guess it's heretical to suggest somebody use plugins in Go, if the whole idea is everything is a static binary.

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I don't think this forks Caddy. Rather, it is a Caddy plugin: https://github.com/dunglas/frankenphp/blob/main/caddy/caddy....

It uses mainline Caddy: https://github.com/dunglas/frankenphp/blob/main/caddy/go.mod

Can I use an officially released build of Caddy and have that official Caddy executable load FrankenPHP?

Definitely! (using xcaddy and compiling PHP yourself, for now)

Caddy plug-ins are statically compiled into the server. Generally you need to build your own binaries if you’re using plugins. There’s an official script, xcaddy, to make that easy.

Hard to think this method takes off as people are reluctant to run their own binary that can't be updated with the rest of the system which in turn gives less users to report bugs and blogs about usage/reviews.

Depends on the package manager. Some package managers support overlays so you can keep your package modifications as a layer on top of the base package.

I know you can using Nix for sure. I think Arch/pacman (Arch Build System) and Gentoo/portage (since it is source-based) also have this concept, but I’ve never used it. No clue about other package managers.

The downside is that package updates will require a recompilation, but you can use binary caches to centralise this slightly.

Early Hints breaks a lot of the common APIs (like FastCGI/FPM) where you are expected to have one request and one response. I don't know how Caddy specifically works, but I suspect that may be the reason for the fork.

Early Hints support was added to Caddy's proxy by Kevin Dunglas, the author of FrankenPHP. No fork required for Early Hints!

I love the idea but as far as I can tell there isn’t a portable way to do plug-ins in go that works with windows, is there?

If you're talking about Caddy, its plugins are cross-platform, because Go (as long as you don't use CGO, or at least that your plugin that needs CGO also works on Windows). Read about Caddy's architecture here: https://caddyserver.com/docs/architecture

go does have some support for dynamically loaded shared libraries. I haven't used it, so I can't speak to how good it is, or any pitfalls.

https://pkg.go.dev/plugin

It is not good. I don’t know of any major projects that use it. Instead people: * compile in plugins

* run plugins as separate processes and expect them to implement a specific RPC api

Compiling in plugins is more practical in Go then it might be in another language, due to the regularity of the go build system.

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