{labelN} Placeholder - Endian Issue

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1

The caddy {labelN} placeholder is described as follows:

The Nth label of the host (where N is an integer, at least 1); examples: {label2} of “sub.example.com” is “example”. {label1} of “*.example.com” is the subdomain portion only.

Unfortunately, the label numbers are assigned from left-to-right, rather than from right-to-left. For example, here are the label numbers for various domain/sub-domain combinations under the current (left-to-right) eval implementation:

caddy.com: label1=caddy, label2=com
www.caddy.com: label1=www, label2=caddy, label3=com
admin.www.caddy.com: label1=admin, label2=www, label3=caddy, label4=com

By contrast, right-to-left assignment would result in more consistent output (see label1 and label2):

caddy.com: label1=com, label2=caddy
www.caddy.com: label1=com, label2=caddy, label3=www
admin.www.caddy.com: label1=com, label2=caddy, label3=www, label4=admin

Right-to-left assignment enables many common configuration scripting use-cases. For example, the following rather useful auto-placeholder is currently impossible under current assignment rules:

caddy.com www.caddy.com admin.www.caddy.com {
    root /www/web site/caddy.com
    # auto-generate of "/www/weblogs/caddy.com/access.log" that works
    # for the above block is not possible under left-to-right eval...
    log / /www/weblogs/{labelX}.{labelY}/access.log
    # but this would always work, if {labelN} were right-to-left assigned;
    # the result would always be "caddy.com" regardless of conn host:
    log / /www/weblogs/{label2}.{label1}/access.log
}

By contrast, if the {labelN} placeholder were assigned right-to-left, the above would work regardless of the number of levels of sub-domains present in the domain block directive.

Is there a chance you would consider having the {labelN} placeholder eval in a direction (right-to-left) which results in more useful output?

1 Like
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Why do you gotta keep making such good points, @LewPayne. :sweat_smile:

This would be a pretty major breaking change. (Which, I guess we should do before 1.0.)

Or maybe we have {rlabelN} instead, for reverse…

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{rlabelN} is better than no label. Yes, this would work if the collateral damage of reworking {labelN} is too great.

4

Or maybe {label-2} to mean second from right.

5

{label-2} to mean 2nd from right.

This would be equally fine, despite my distaste for it… which I can’t justify, other than bike-shedding (nit-picking at every little detail, rather than getting off my ass and doing the work myself) at this point.

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