Get Caddy up and running in minutes with this quick start guide. You’ll learn how to serve static files and set up a reverse proxy with automatic HTTPS.
Prerequisites Before you begin, make sure you have Caddy installed. See the installation guide if you haven’t installed Caddy yet.
Verify your installation:
Serve a Static Site
Create a simple HTML file
Create an index.html file in a new directory: mkdir mysite cd mysite echo '<h1>Hello from Caddy!</h1>' > index.html
Start Caddy
Run Caddy with the file server: Your site is now available at http://localhost:2015 Use a Caddyfile For more control, create a Caddyfile in your site directory:
Then start Caddy:
Caddy automatically looks for a Caddyfile in the current directory when you run caddy run without specifying a config.
Enable Automatic HTTPS To enable automatic HTTPS for a real domain:
For automatic HTTPS to work:
You must own the domain
DNS must point to your server
Ports 80 and 443 must be open
Caddy must be publicly accessible
Reverse Proxy Here’s how to proxy requests to a backend application:
localhost reverse_proxy localhost:8080
This forwards all requests to your application running on port 8080.
With Path-Based Routing localhost handle /api/* { reverse_proxy localhost:8080 } handle { file_server }
Common Caddyfile Patterns Static Site with Compression example.com encode gzip file_server
SPA (Single Page Application) example.com root * /var/www/myapp try_files {path} /index.html file_server
example.com reverse_proxy localhost:3000 { header_up X-Real-IP {remote_host} }
Multiple Sites site1.com { root * /var/www/site1 file_server } site2.com { reverse_proxy localhost:8080 }
Production Operations
Start Caddy as a service
Use caddy start to run in the background:
Reload configuration
After changing your Caddyfile: This performs a zero-downtime reload. Using the Admin API Caddy’s admin API runs on localhost:2019 by default.
Get current config curl localhost:2019/config/
Load a new config curl localhost:2019/load \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d @config.json
Next Steps
Core Concepts Learn about Caddy’s architecture and module system
Caddyfile Master the Caddyfile configuration format
Reverse Proxy Deep dive into reverse proxy configuration
CLI Reference Explore all Caddy commands