I don’t think this is the direct cause of what you’ve experienced. And as I’ve tried but cannot reproduce this, there’s details missing to pin this down.
I may have bumped into the same issue - the Caddy upgrade from 10.6 to 10.8 I just did failed to start (service caddy status reports a core dump). This is Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS on Linux amd64. Launching manually as “cd /etc/caddy && sudo caddy” works, so I’m using that via nohup for now.
PS. I’m looking forward to SIGUSR2 binary reloads (once safe and robust). It’s a major convenience for long-term Caddy use, IMO: once you have a working setup, easily staying up to date becomes the key recurring feature.
@Lee_Hambley What is operating system in question? I noticed that the PrivateDevices directive doesn’t appear to play nice with caddy when selinux is enabled on Fedora 26. I’m not sure if that was the same issue you have or not.