# Caddy

114 Hacker News commenters recommended Caddy and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** A web server and reverse proxy people pick for fully automatic HTTPS certificates and a very short config file, though some find it slower than Nginx under heavy load.

## Why people recommend it

- Automatic HTTPS certificate management (15 comments): "Caddy checks a Rails endpoint before issuing any certificate, so random domains pointed at your IP won't trigger cert issuance." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587489)) "Caddy runs on top of Go's excellent acme library that handles all of the cert acquisition and renewal process automatically." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47697708)) "simply add a tag/label to your docker compose files for each of self hosted services to get a real SSL, that auto renewed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48856469))
- Short, simple configuration (7 comments): "For common web server scenarios, a Caddyfile is very short, much shorter than a typical Apache or nginx configuration." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45880966)) "Adding Caddy as a proxy server is literally one line in Caddyfile, and I trust Caddy to do it right" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800993)) "Here's the entirety of the Caddy config to reverse proxy something with managed tls certs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49211227))
- Easy reverse proxy for self-hosting (7 comments): "you can also use a reverse proxy like caddy or nginx where encryption and security are primary concerns" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605675)) "TLS only takes a few minutes to add to a self hosted solution, just plop caddy in front of your server" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46210619)) "Adding Caddy as a proxy server is literally one line in Caddyfile, and I trust Caddy to do it right" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800993))
- Reliable and battle-tested (4 comments): "I can rely on gifts to the world like Linux, Debian, PostgreSQL, Apache, Nginx, Caddy, and Yggdrasil without any problems for decades." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026936)) "My web apps aren't allowed to think about TLS, they sit behind Caddy and I'm secure as long as I keep it updated" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46729072)) "if you're looking for something that "just works" and is widely used, have a look at caddy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616278))

## What people warn about

- Slower than Nginx (3 comments): "Caddy, their developers and community refuse to believe Caddy is slow is a much bigger issue." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540197)) "Caddy on that machine bottlenecks at 300MB/s despite using 100% of the CPU" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48535541)) "Another benchmarks showing Caddy not performing on par with Nginx" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431704))
- Security and vulnerability concerns (3 comments): "Caddy's admin interface is system-wide opened, any local user can inject configuration and take over everything." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863033)) "it's written in go so probably listening on an mtcp socket meaning you are probably vulnerable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50326448)) "Caddy had multiple vulnerabilities in its request parsing this year" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48140552))
- Certificate edge cases and quirks (4 comments): "if you are routing over tailscale exclusively Caddy can't automatically validate the domain names over ACME" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613907)) "It works, but as another comment mentioned there may be quirks with IP certs, specifically IPv6" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648886)) "there’s no indication from Caddy that you would only be able to renew the cert twice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120310))
- Sponsor header controversy (2 comments): "putting ads in your servers via a `Caddy-Sponsors` header" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147057)) "I am unstarring Caddy. That's absolutely wild." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155180))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [nginx](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nginx.md): 130 recommend
- [FrankenPHP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/frankenphp.md): 15 recommend
- [Redbean](https://hackerapproved.com/p/redbean.md): 9 recommend
- [Kestrel web server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kestrel.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Caddy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/caddy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).