Encountering issues with serving static files from a subdirectory of the website root path

Help
1

1. The problem I’m having:

I am trying to use Caddy as my web server. The website root is at /var/www/myurl.com, in which I have files such as index.html, etc.

All these files are served just fine. However, I also wish to serve other static files from the /var/www/myurl.com/assets directory, but these are not found by Caddy.

If I do a simple mv /var/www/myurlcom/assets/some_file.txt /var/www/myurl.com/, then that file would also be served.

I have tried tinkering with permissions (as suggested by Understanding Permissions for the Caddy server ) and adding a manual handle directive (as suggested by V2: File Server Subdirectory with Listings ), but none of these suggestions worked.

Based on the documentation for file_server, it seems that all should work fine without much further configuration needed, but I am clearly missing something.

2. Error messages and/or full log output:

No explicit error messages, but I am not seeing the intended behaviou as described in the above section.

3. Caddy version:

v2.11.4 h1:XKxkMTgNSizEvKG6QHue6cAsFOteU2qA61w2tKkCWi0=

4. How I installed and ran Caddy:

I installed Caddy as a .deb package (as per Install — Caddy Documentation ) and am running it as a system service (i.e. sudo systemctl start caddy). Perhaps worth mentioning that it also happens if I run Caddy as via the CLI, i.e. caddy run --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile.

a. System environment:

Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS x86_64. Not running as Docker container.

b. Command:

sudo systemctl start caddy

… and after making changes to my Caddyfile, I run:

caddy reload --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

d. My complete Caddy config:

myurl.com {
	root /var/www/myurl.com
	file_server
}

(throughout this post, I have changed the actual domain name to myurl.com to stay anonymous)

2

When you have the file under assets/, how are you requesting the file? What’s the URL you’re using?

3

Hello Mohammed,

In the case of my example with /var/www/myurl.com/assets/some_file.txt, I request the file by going to Firefox and entering https://myurl.com/assets/some_file.txt.

PS. Thanks for creating this great project :slight_smile:

4

Enable debug level logs by adding this to the top of your Caddyfile

{
    debug
}

Then make a request and copy the log for he please

5

In the process of enabling the debug logs, I tried running Caddy as root, and the files were correctly served. So it’s definitely an issue with file permissions.

However, I would still like for the system service to work (where the caddy user owns the process).

I tried running the following commands from root:

chown -R www-data:www-data assets
chown -R caddy:caddy assets
chmod -R 644 assets

Even though I confirmed that all the files are correctly owned by with ls -l assets, every time I request the files from a web browser, it still doesn’t work.

Any ideas about what the issue could be?

6

The second line here invalidates the first line. You can’t have the same set of files owned by 2 different users/groups.

The caddy user, which is used by systemd, is a member of its own group as well as www-data. This means it should be able to access the files if they’re owned by either of them. Do you have selinux?

7

Ah, should perhaps have specified that I did not run all three lines at once :slight_smile: I ran a line, checked if the issue was fixed, and then ran the next.

And yes, I would agree, this is the output of ls -l:

-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  57529 Sep 24 13:26 some_file.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  57529 Sep 24 13:26 some_other_file.txt

And here is the verification that the systemctl service is running as the caddy user. The file /lib/systemd/system/caddy.servicecontains:

# caddy.service
#
# For using Caddy with a config file.
#
# Make sure the ExecStart and ExecReload commands are correct
# for your installation.
#
# See https://caddyserver.com/docs/install for instructions.
#
# WARNING: This service does not use the --resume flag, so if you
# use the API to make changes, they will be overwritten by the
# Caddyfile next time the service is restarted. If you intend to
# use Caddy's API to configure it, add the --resume flag to the
# `caddy run` command or use the caddy-api.service file instead.

[Unit]
Description=Caddy
Documentation=https://caddyserver.com/docs/
After=network.target network-online.target
Requires=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=notify
User=caddy
Group=caddy
ExecStart=/usr/bin/caddy run --environ --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
ExecReload=/usr/bin/caddy reload --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile --force
TimeoutStopSec=5s
LimitNOFILE=1048576
PrivateTmp=true
ProtectSystem=full
AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_ADMIN CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

And confirming that caddy user is part of the www-data group:

>> getent group | grep caddy
www-data:x:33:caddy
caddy:x:988:

No, SELinux is disabled.

FWIW, I also tried removing the entire /var/www/myurl.com directory and starting from a clean slate, to assert that no lingering configuration, permission etc was causing trouble, but this didn’t work either.

8

Share the logs let us see what’s happening

9

Perhaps expected, it turns out that a lingering file permission was the cause of the issue. After reinstalling everything completely from scratch, it worked :slight_smile:

@Mohammed90, thanks a lot for your diligent support!