Last week, the first Release Candidate of Caddy 2 saw the light of day. I don’t usually like to run production environments on beta software, but for Caddy I wanted to make an exception
$ caddy version
v2.0.0-rc.2 h1:7NOaxYrsnQ5D3rcLGn2UnLZHLfBpgrfM/JNTLhjCJ1c=
If you’re reading this post, it’s now being served by Caddy 2. If you can’t read it because you’re getting TLS errors or exceptions, well … then this is Schrödingers Blogpost. 😬
Changes in syntax & config
Caddy has some of the cleanest documentation I’ve ever seen in an open source project. Their upgrade guide covered all the necessities for me.
In total, this was the diff for this particular site.
A change for the document root, explicitly enable static file serving & the gzip naming had changed:
ma.ttias.be {
- root /var/www/html/ma.ttias.be/public
- gzip
+ root * /var/www/html/ma.ttias.be/public
+ file_server
+ encode zstd gzip
[...]
}
Further more, the syntax for logging is modified, since the default is now a structured, JSON, log.
ma.ttias.be {
[...]
- log / /var/www/html/ma.ttias.be/logs/access.log "{combined}" {
- rotate_size 200
- rotate_age 14
- rotate_keep 14
- rotate_compress
- }
+ log {
+ output file /var/www/html/ma.ttias.be/logs/access.log
+ format single_field common_log
+ }
}
None of these are groundbreaking changes.
HTTP/3 and TLS 1.3
I added one extra config to the new Caddyfile:
{
experimental_http3
}
Hooray, this blog is now served via HTTP/3 (technically: h3-27). 🥳
It’s advertised in the headers that there is an alternative protocol to reach this site at:
$ curl -I https://ma.ttias.be
HTTP/2 200
accept-ranges: bytes
alt-svc: h3-27=":443"; ma=2592000
[...]
That’s what the alt-svc (alternative service) header is for.
By default, Caddy also serves via TLS 1.3, something that is very hard to achieve with “traditional” webservers. openssl, to which most webservers are linked against, needs a very recent version to support TLS 1.3.
Upgrading is a non-event
I didn’t run into anything out of the ordinary, the guides were clear and the changes are well documented.
At this point, I’m guessing most users can upgrade from Caddy v1 to v2 in under an hour.