Supervised Caddy

Jan 31, 2017

Caddy, the HTTP/2 web server with automatic HTTPS, is easy to configure and use. The release package contains information about executing Caddy as a service, e.g. with Systemd or Upstart.

This post shows a configuration using Supervisor a process control and monitoring system. Benefits are: reboot safe execution, automatic restart after crashes and execution as a non-root user.

The following steps were tried on Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 and Debian 8.

Prepare Caddy

• Copy the Caddy executable to /usr/local/bin. If you use any plugins (e.g. Hugo) you might want to copy other required binaries as well.
• Create directory for log files:
  • mkdir /var/log/caddy
  • chown www-data:www-data /var/log/caddy
• Create working directory for Caddy:
  • mkdir -p /etc/caddy/ssl
  • chown www-data:www-data /etc/caddy/ssl
• Copy your Caddyfile to /etc/caddy. Logfiles should be written to /var/log/caddy.
• Allow Caddy to use privileged ports
  setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/local/bin/caddy

Prepare Supervisor

• Install the required package: sudo apt-get install supervisor
• Create /etc/supervisor/conf.d/caddy.conf

[program:caddy]
command=/usr/local/bin/caddy -agree=true -email=<your mail> -conf=/etc/caddy/Caddyfile
environment=CADDYPATH=/etc/caddy/ssl
directory=/var/log/caddy
user=www-data
stdout_logfile=/var/log/caddy/caddy.log
stderr_logfile=/var/log/caddy/caddy.log
autostart=true
autorestart=true
startsecs=10
stopwaitsecs=600
startretries=3

Manage Caddy execution

Supervised processes can be managed using supervisorctl.

# supervisorctl status
caddy               RUNNING    pid 954, uptime 1 day, 21:16:16

root@mschoebel:~# supervisorctl restart caddy
caddy: stopped
caddy: started

Caddy output (e.g. during startup) is written to /var/log/caddy/caddy.log.

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