Step by Step: Build Caddy From the Source (22/8/18)

After finished setting up my VPS, next I want to install Caddy as my web server. Even though Caddy is still quite new, I prefer using it rather than the existing web server like Apache or Nginx. The reasons are :

  • It's the only web server that uses HTTPS by default.
  • It's easy to configure. For example, to enable HTTPs we only need to write 3-line configuration file.
  • Because it's written in Go, it's only use single binary without any dependencies, which make it really easy to install.
  • It's production ready and has been used by many people.

While Caddy already provides a precompiled binary, it's only free for personal use. In other hand, I still don't have the privilege to pay the monthly payment for the commercial license. Fortunately, that limitation only implemented for the precompiled binary. That means we still can use Caddy for free even for commercial use, as long as we built it from the source.

Table of Contents

  1. Install Go
  2. Download Caddy and Its Plugin
  3. Build Caddy
  4. Run Caddy

Install Go

First, download the latest Go version to your VPS. When this post is written, the latest version is 1.10.3 :

wget https://dl.google.com/go/go1.10.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Next, extract the downloaded file into /usr/local, creating a Go tree in /usr/local/go :

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.10.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Add /usr/local/go/bin to the PATH environment variable, either in your /etc/profile (for a system-wide installation) or $HOME/.profile. Open the profile file using nano or your preferred editor, then add these lines to the end of file :

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

For conveniance, you should add the Go workspace's bin subdirectory to your PATH to let you run the compiled Go program directly. Open the profile file again then add following lines :

export GOPATH=$(go env GOPATH)
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

Once finished, save and close the profile file. To apply the change, run source to your profile file :

source $HOME/.profile

Now, go should be installed on your system. To test it, run go env which should give you output like this :

GOARCH="amd64"
GOBIN=""
GOCACHE="/home/radhi/.cache/go-build"
GOEXE=""
GOHOSTARCH="amd64"
GOHOSTOS="linux"
GOOS="linux"
GOPATH="/home/radhi/go"
GORACE=""
GOROOT="/usr/local/go"
GOTMPDIR=""
GOTOOLDIR="/usr/local/go/pkg/tool/linux_amd64"
GCCGO="gccgo"
CC="gcc"
CXX="g++"
CGO_ENABLED="1"
CGO_CFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_CPPFLAGS=""
CGO_CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_FFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_LDFLAGS="-g -O2"
PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config"
GOGCCFLAGS="-fPIC -m64 -pthread -fno-caret-diagnostics -Qunused-arguments -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=/tmp/go-build238814194=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches"

Download Caddy and Its Plugin

To build Caddy from source, run these commands :

go get -u -v github.com/mholt/caddy/caddy
go get -u -v github.com/caddyserver/builds

Next download the plugin that you want to use. In my case, I will use these plugins :

  • git, the git plugin that make it possible to deploy a site with a simple git push.
  • dns.cloudflare, which allows you to obtain certificates using DNS records for domains managed with Cloudflare.

To download these plugins, run :

go get -u -v github.com/abiosoft/caddy-git
go get -u -v github.com/caddyserver/dnsproviders/cloudflare

Build Caddy

Before building Caddy, we have to include the plugins to the Caddy's source code. First, set working directory to Caddy's directory :

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/mholt/caddy/caddy

Next, open the caddymain/run.go and add imports link for packages of the plugins that you want to install :

    _ "github.com/abiosoft/caddy-git"
    _ "github.com/caddyserver/dnsproviders/cloudflare"

Save and close the file. Next, still in the caddy directory, build Caddy by running :

go install

Once finished, you can run Caddy by using caddy command.

Run Caddy

As web server, Caddy will need the access to port 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPs). To do so, we need to let Caddy to listen to port < 1024 by running :

sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep $GOPATH/bin/caddy

Next we need to increase the maximum number of open files in our server. To do this, we need to increase the limit of file descriptor by running :

ulimit -n 8192

Now we could run Caddy in background as the web server. There are several ways to do this. First is by making Caddy as service for init system. The second one is easier, by using nohup &. The full command is like this :

nohup caddy -conf "/path/to/Caddyfile" >> ~/Caddy.log 2>&1 &

The command above will run caddy in background and put the log file in $HOME/Caddy.log. To make Caddy run when the server start, you can use the cron job. To do this, first open the configuration file by running :

crontab -e

Next add these lines to the end of file :

@reboot . $HOME/.profile && nohup caddy -conf "/path/to/Caddyfile" >> ~/Caddy.log 2>&1 &

Save and close the configuration file. The @reboot syntax means the command in that line will be run after every reboot on the system. The . $HOME/.profile is used to load environment variable that defined by the profile file. This is done because cron is started before the .profile file is loaded, so we need to load it manually.

Finished

At this point, Caddy has been installed on your system and will run automatically when system starts. You should check the documentation to learn how to create Caddyfile and activate the HTTPs for your site.