In this article I am going to show you how to server static files using Caddy.
I am going to use Docker to run Caddy, take a quick look at this article on how to run Caddy using Docker.
Prepare index.html file #
Prepare the index.html file which you will be serving using Caddy.
<html> <head> <title>Hello Caddy</title> </head> <body> <h1>Hello Caddy</h1> </body> </html>index.html
Create the Caddyfile #
Let's start with a simple Caddyfile that runs the server on port 80 of the docker container.
:80Caddyfile
Run this simple file using the following command.
docker run --rm --name caddy -p 8080:80 -v ${PWD}/Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile caddy:latest
You will get the output.
$ docker run --rm --name caddy -p 8080:80 -v ${PWD}/Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile caddy:latest
{"level":"info","ts":1687325417.6084845,"msg":"using provided configuration","config_file":"/etc/caddy/Caddyfile","config_adapter":"caddyfile"}
{"level":"warn","ts":1687325417.6088786,"msg":"Caddyfile input is not formatted; run the 'caddy fmt' command to fix inconsistencies","adapter":"caddyfile","file":"/etc/caddy/Caddyfile","line":2}
{"level":"info","ts":1687325417.6095884,"logger":"admin","msg":"admin endpoint started","address":"localhost:2019","enforce_origin":false,"origins":["//localhost:2019","//[::1]:2019","//127.0.0.1:2019"]}
{"level":"info","ts":1687325417.6099453,"logger":"tls.cache.maintenance","msg":"started background certificate maintenance","cache":"0xc0000cff10"}
{"level":"warn","ts":1687325417.6103315,"logger":"http","msg":"server is listening only on the HTTP port, so no automatic HTTPS will be applied to this server","server_name":"srv0","http_port":80}
{"level":"info","ts":1687325417.6104715,"logger":"http.log","msg":"server running","name":"srv0","protocols":["h1","h2","h3"]}
{"level":"info","ts":1687325417.610657,"msg":"autosaved config (load with --resume flag)","file":"/config/caddy/autosave.json"}
{"level":"info","ts":1687325417.6106935,"msg":"serving initial configuration"}
{"level":"info","ts":1687325417.6107538,"logger":"tls","msg":"cleaning storage unit","description":"FileStorage:/data/caddy"}
{"level":"info","ts":1687325417.6108081,"logger":"tls","msg":"finished cleaning storage units"}
file_server directive #
Use the file_server directive to setup a basic fileserver in Caddy.
:80 file_serverCaddyfile
If you run the above Caddyfile nothing will show up if you visit http://localhost:8080, we still have to tell Caddy where to find the index.html file.
Let's say all the files we want to serve are under /www/html folder in the container. Use the root directive to tell Caddy which is the root folder to serve files from.
:80 root * /www/html file_serverCaddyfile
Mounting file in docker container #
Since we are running Caddy in a Docker container, we need to mount our index.html inside the contianer.
You can do that by doing -v ${PWD}/index.html:/www/html/index.html, this will place the index.html file in the /www/html folder in the container.
docker run --rm --name caddy -p 8080:80 \
-v ${PWD}/Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile \
-v ${PWD}/index.html:/www/html/index.html \
caddy:latest
Visit http://localhost:8080 and you should see Hello Caddy being displayed.
