Show HN: Caddy, a cross-platform HTTP/2 web server

(Incidentally, I really hope my little Digital Ocean droplet can handle the load. Wouldn't that be ironic? Anyway, if you have trouble, try the plain HTTP/1.1 site or the GitHub project page: https://github.com/mholt/caddy)

https://github.com/mholt/caddy/blob/master/server/server.go

That the actual web server in use is:

https://github.com/bradfitz/http2

Which isn't to detract from the Caddy project which offers a tidy set of configuration options so that the lib is more like an Nginx executable with config files.

Perhaps the README can be updated though, as "Caddy binaries are available for nearly every platform and has no dependencies" is a bit misleading. The binary produced by Go may not have dependencies, but the Go code itself has a few large dependencies.

But also, in terms of Separation of Concerns, it doesn't seem like the server should be responsible for compilation tasks when it doesn't need to be. It would be much better to move that out into a separate tool for compiling Markdown to HTML (perhaps on-save, for authoring) - many of those already exist. Or, if you really wanted to perform compilation during a request, it could at least be moved out of the server core, into a FastCGI script (perhaps something like https://menteslibres.net/luminos/).

Oh, and that whole method of using a `Caddyfile` at the root of the project, for configuration, is quite nice.

It has random load balancing, glob patterns for hosts, SSH proxying (like sslh) and, most importantly, proxying to UNIX sockets. And less code.

Maybe you could use my code to implement some of these features :-)

    - rc4 acceptance
    - Session resumption (caching) No (IDs empty)
    - no OCSP stapling
    - Next Protocol Negotiation (NPN) Yes, but not signalling a http/1.1 fallback

Also, if you want to convince me to switch to Caddy from Nginx, perhaps a page with succinct explanation of its advantages would be helpful?

Lastly, this is just my opinion, but I don't want my web server to have a Markdown interpreter in it. That's not a job for the web server. It's very easy to put a very simple index file in front of Markdown to provide that functionality.

Also, do you have any plans to make Caddy support domain proxying (or whatever it's called) where you can specify that requests for certain sites should be proxied to a service running on another host + port combination (if it doesn't support that already)?

Definitely a cool project though. I'll keep an eye on it. Keep up the excellent work!

Returning a non 200 or 300 redirect code.

Stripping headers

Deciding status on more than server name and path

Finally, there was discussion earlier on HN on how to write plugins which communicate via sockets... Might be an interesting addition to consider adding to your middleware API.

One recommendation I would make is the addition of some simple load balancing, even round robin would be great.

    404 Not Found

Edit: Following the link from the homepage works, but hitting F5 or loading it without a referrer provides a 404. Weird.

Is this the first http2 server released?

Looks good otherwise!

With Caddy or another solution.