Ideal for SaaS: our new Caddy-powered forum platform!

Hi folks,

This is the first place I’ve mentioned this:

We’ve just released a brand new forum platform called Babble.

Everything in front of the application is being handled by Caddy!

All our clients use custom domains. So after initially identifying Caddy as the ideal solution for TLS, we ended up using it for load-balancing, rate-limiting and caching. It’s completely replaced Nginx, and allowed us to simplify our architecture considerably.

One of my goals for this project was to reduce the number of dependencies and moving parts to an absolute minimum, so I’m thrilled with the solution. And yes, shaving down the Caddyfile to the fewest chars possible even lived up to its promise of being “kind of fun” :smiley:

Our other app, PlushForums, has been going since 2014. In January 2017 I think we were the first forum platform to ship automated SSL using LetsEncrypt. That was a single-tenant app and a scripted solution just about worked.

That was untenable in a multi-tenant environment, so thank goodness Caddy came on the scene. Big thanks to @matt and the team for a wonderful piece of software that will hopefully allow us and our clients to do great things.

-Adrian
Founder, babble.im

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I’d also like to highlight what I think is an under-appreciated usage pattern that Caddy enables:

Namely, using active healthchecks to do rolling upgrades of backend servers, without any config reloads or scripting.

Make a backend respond negatively to healthchecks, wait n seconds for Caddy to take it down, do your work, wait for Caddy to bring it back online.

Nginx only gives you passive checks, unless you’re willing to drop some serious coin. So big win for Caddy. The less orchestration required the better in my view!

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Wow, that’s super cool! Thank you for sharing your use case and the advantages/benefits there. Your product looks great!

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Cheers! Hope to become a sponsor one day.

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