Caddy file directive, parse error?

[Whitestrake (Matthew Fay)]

Hi @C_Fong, I’m going to try to elaborate a little bit on what was likely to be causing your issues.

In your initial question:

@C_Fong

The text of the error:

2019/03/06 11:45:03 Caddyfile:3 - Error during parsing: Unknown directive 'http://jQuery.test'

I looks like I can stack the site definitions, but the parse error above is ever present. I’m sure I’m missing something, but I’m not certain what.

To quote from that document:

To configure multiple sites with a single Caddyfile, you must use curly braces around each one to separate their configurations:

—https://caddyserver.com/tutorial/caddyfile

Notably, :8888 doesn’t have a curly braced block, and so you have not used curly braces around each one.

---

@C_Fong

Addendem - 2019-03-06-1227

I also tried the following in the caddyfile and got past the parse error but still didn’t get to my index file

http://jQuery.test:8888 {
  root c:\tools\jQuery_exp
}

If there was a file called c:\tools\jQuery_exp\index.html (or perhaps index.htm or index.txt), Caddy should have served it if you navigated to http://jQuery.test:8888 in your browser. If the file exists, and it wasn’t served, there’s another issue at play that might need to be investigated.

---

@C_Fong

– 2019-03-06-1240 –

I was looking a few other caddy files here on the forum and though I’d try one more thing

*.xxxxxx.test:8888{
  jQuery.xxxxxx.test {
    root c:\tools\jQuery_exp
  }
}

and got the following response:

2019/03/06 12:39:18 Caddyfile:2 - Error during parsing: Unknown directive 'jQuery.calpet.test'

This is called nesting, and the Caddyfile does not support nesting sites within sites (or directives within directives, for that matter).

Each site must be at the top (left-most) level of the Caddyfile.

---

@C_Fong

Ok one last thing then I’ll stop for awhile.

Tried this caddyfile:

http://jQuery.calpet.test {
  root c:\tools\jQuery_exp
  proxy / localhost:8000 {
    transparent
  }
}

No parse error!
But the output at the terminal says:

λ caddy
Activating privacy features... done.

Serving HTTP on port 80
http://jquery.calpet.test

But I told it to be on port 8000

@conorlburns picked up the fix for this one somewhat, but to elaborate, you didn’t tell Caddy to serve port 8000; you told Caddy to serve the default HTTP port (by specifying http:// but leaving out a port in the site label).

It looks like, instead, you told Caddy to proxy to localhost on port 8000. That means when you connect to Caddy and request http://jquery.calpet.test, Caddy connects to its own localhost on port 8000 and returns the result to you.

This might come back here…

@C_Fong

Thanks! That does parse correctly.

The browser is still coming back with “Server not available”.

It looks like you have Caddy proxying to itself. It’s listening on port 8000 and proxying to port 8000. Looking at the configuration offered by @conorlburns, I would expect to see Site is not served on this interface to be the result.

This is a classic case, I think, of overthinking the Caddyfile. Lets get back to basics: What do you want Caddy to do for you, in plain English?