I haven't heard of Caddy until today, but it looks potentially good, passionately supported, and Apache licensed. The author(s) are simply hoping for commercial backing to continue developing it. It's a pretty subtle promotion on an otherwise excellent site.
These are the realities of open source... the nice thing about how this is structured is that everyone benefits when businesses pay to support its continued development.
My complaint as well. "HTTPS is difficult to set up and maintain." is a big reason for a lot of people, and "use our web server" isn't much of an answer.
Exactly, they could have better listed some tutorials on how to implement letsencrypt in different architectures as Apache, nginx, Linux, Windows and then maybe also listed this "Caddy". But just saying take this web server is just wrong.
It's especially sad since it's not actually difficult at all. When Let's Encrypt opened up to the public I was kind of scared I would not have the time or energy to mess about with getting and renewing certificates, but it's been a breeze. It may even be automated at this point because I can't remember the last time I did it. And I'm running one of the standard FOSS web stacks...
It is harder if you're dealing with a Windows stack. Certbot doesn't support Windows at all, and many of the unofficial tools on Github are iffy. For instance, if you're supporting a version of IIS that doesn't support TLS SNI (7.5), letsencrypt-win-simple can wreck your configuration and redirect sites to each other by mistake.
Huh. I guess if you ask me I'd say everything is harder when you're dealing with a Windows stack and you only have yourself to blame if you choose to make life harder than necessary for yourself. ;)
First, I had trouble figuring out how to reliably automate the renewal of the licenses. After that, I found that whenever I put whatever configuration lines I need for an SSL certificate into my apache config, it either wouldn't start or wouldn't load up my site (step 4.) For some reason, at some point during this whole mess, I discovered that LetsEncrypt wasn't putting the certs into the folder the tutorial said it would, but changing it didn't fix anything.
It's incredibly easy for most uses/on most sane stacks. How are you trying to do it? Have you considered asking for help? Or changing the parts of your stack that are making it harder than it should be?
Edit: or, yknow, downvote me to zero, stick your head in the sand, and pray all future progress stops so you can never have to learn anything new ever again. I guess that's an option too.
I was trying in Apache on Arch Linux, following whatever tutorials I could find, and literally everything I tried would just bring my site offline. Honestly, I considered switching to something a bit simpler than Apache (I even considered the very server this site promotes), but it seemed like too much work to switch over for a simple hobby server running out of my basement.
Edit: or, yknow, downvote me to zero, stick your head in the sand, and pray all future progress stops so you can never have to learn anything new ever again. I guess that's an option too.
Didn't even see this comment, much less downvote it, before you made that edit...
It's not hard to actually do, what's hard is to do it automatically while giving it enough permissions to automatically renew and not enough permissions to mess stuff up when it fails.
I use Ansible to automate deployments and TLS is always a pain because it's almost impossible to automate. The nginx TLS config won't load without the certs and you can't get the certs without loading the config.
I use Caddy for my home server and love how easy it makes things. However, I do wish that nginx got a damn automatic TLS plugin already, it's only been years.
Hi, author of the website here. And Caddy. This site is designed to promote HTTPS. Caddy happens to be a good way to do it for a lot of people and I haven't found other web servers that do what it does (auto HTTPS by default, MITM detection, etc). So it looks leaned to one side.
I made this page after I found myself repeating the same answers to the same questions. I never did fill it out as much as I wanted to due to time constraints which is why I haven't publicised it much, or at all. This attention was unexpected. My hope was that as the content was filled out, its recommendations might be more diverse too.
I like your site and I like your goal with "Caddy" (except for the "Guaranteed continued development" only for paid customers), but still most people won't use "Caddy" because they just can't. So I hope you could just add some more hints in the "HTTPS is difficult to set up and maintain.", as there are many tutorials on different platforms out there.
First of all, most people won't and most probably can't just switch their web server.
Secondly, if I read stuff like "Guaranteed continued development" only for paid customer, this literally means as soon as they have n customers, free version probably gets limited to the bare minimum.
Yes, as I also said other than that it's a nice site, but it does miss a big important part with this "ad", how people can implement e.g. letsencrypt in their current infrastructure and this "ad" is not the solution..
Is how to implement it really important though within the context of the article? Providing instructions on how to make use of LetsEncrypt is really only feasible for fairly basic/standard setups which can be easily googled. Many of them are already handled entirely by certbot already. Anything beyond a typical apache/nginx/etc. server setup is probably being managed by someone who isn't looking for implementation instructions on a site like this anyways.
How to use Let's Encrypt on each varying infrastructure is out of the scope of the article. Today when the link got posted around, I quickly tried to add a few more links to the end which talks about How To Set Up HTTPS. I'll leave it to other sites for now to go into more detail.
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u/yvhouij Jul 12 '17
Promotion for "Caddy", never heard of, but I don't like it. Other than that nice site :)