Consider replacing Nginx with Caddy about slickstack HOT 7 CLOSED

Yes. This post was not to make you change the vision of the project but to help in any way I can.

SSL features of Caddy are as configurable as certbot. It's just they have set the best defaults including redundancy. If for some reason Let's encrypt cert failed to generate in repeated attempts then it will switch to ZeroSSL. If you want to use something external then you can disable the auto https too.

Yes. Caddy team is much smaller compared to Nginx. Stripe and Tailscale are heavily relying on it. So I am pretty sure the project have longevity.

I doubt the advantages will disappear as the focus of Nginx is right now on Nginx unit which will be the replacement for standard Nginx in the future. It's an interesting project and have some advantages too. But even there they have no plans to integrate TLS features. https://unit.nginx.org/

It's fair from your perspective to stick with Nginx. But I hope you keep the new interesting projects in mind - Caddy and Nginx Unit. They both are stable as Nginx.

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Hello @hj-collab and thanks for the suggestion.

Have you tried SlickStack yet? I ask because sometimes people come through with requests for major feature changes before they've tested our existing configuration yet... your account also has no history.

Are you doing marketing work for @caddyserver or something? If so, it would be better for real names.

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Anyway instead of just going through GitHub repos tagged #nginx and telling them to use Caddy, it would be a lot more helpful to test our specific stack and see if it's compatible.

Because Caddy is so tightly knit, I'm not even sure it could be swapped in to SlickStack.

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Hi @jessuppi! Thanks! I had tested SlickStack with many other stacks in the past but couldn't continue with it due to single site limitations. My github account is just used for hosting private repos and commenting on the open source projects which I watch for releases and other updates. I keep making feature requests or share information regarding performance and security with all these projects from my experience. I have helped many projects improve their security in the last year and they have benefited from it. A simple github request can do so much wonder. I try to help in the way I can. :)

I do not work for caddy and cannot share my name due to privacy concerns. If you will check those repos which you had checked for my post then you will also notice others feature requests for apparmor implementation for security. I didn't open the same here as the isolation is not much important with a single site compared to other stacks allowing multiple sites on a single server.

I haven't actually tested removing nginx from SlickStack and implementing Caddy there. But I don't think replacing the web server will cause much trouble. There might be few areas where you need to check. If you use any custom nginx module, fastcgi caching and rate limiting capabilities. Caddy does not incorporate caching or rate limiting capabilities in the core and you will need to build it with the respective modules. There is one reason I recommend Caddy much is it's TLS certs handling. Have not seen any cert generation failure with it and certbot used to have it's occasional erratic behaviour putting me through hell.

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Okay then,

I had tested SlickStack with many other stacks in the past but couldn't continue with it due to single site limitations.

But this wouldn't change per se just from using Caddy, it's the vision of our project.

Caddy does not incorporate caching or rate limiting capabilities in the core and you will need to build it with the respective modules.

This alone would probably disqualify Caddy from being a good match for our project, as some fairly high-traffic sites have used SlickStack and some nitty-gritty settings are sometimes desired. Currently we can do all of this using the bundled features of Nginx in the nginx-extras package maintained by Ubuntu... no compiling required.

I haven't played with Caddy but from my understanding, the SSL/Let's Encrypt feature is the big selling point. Granted that is always nice to have things automated but it also means you can't adjust it.

Caddy is also still a newer project I think, with a small team... our team is also small, so having multiple components of our stack relying on small teams does not instill as much confidence about longevity, etc. It's part of the reason I chose MySQL instead of MariaDB, as stability is really our most valued aspect.

I imagine there are other things that Caddy might get us boxed into... it just doesn't seem to hold to the Unix philosophy or play very nice with other components.

And in a few more Nginx releases, some of these advantages might disappear... I try not to chase the latest and greatest software and value long-term stability above all else.

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Closing this for now, but future comments are welcome re: Caddy, thanks!

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https://slickstack.io/forum/topic/would-slickstack-ever-consider-using-caddy-not-nginx

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