NGINX Unit vs Caddy apps

[gcss (Carl Drechsel)]

Ref: Caddy v2 is actually designed as an "app platform". The HTTP app is just one suc... | Hacker News

This is a powerful vision that really excites me (and my team). This would be extremely welcome but before jumping to conclusions I wanted to understand if:

• there’s a plan/vision to build a “saner” or “friendlier” NGINX Unit?
• what would be needed to support ASGI apps so that I can run my Python FastAPI/ASGI apps directly from Caddy? (the FastCGI support is definitely high value for PHP shops!) - my concern is that the plan is to support only Go “apps” instead of a wider language/ecosystem (the idea is still powerful, it just makes me sad that I can’t have my Python FastAPI/ASGI apps join in on the fun!)

[francislavoie]

@gcss

there’s a plan/vision to build a “saner” or “friendlier” NGINX Unit?

Not really? We don’t compare ourselves to that.

@gcss

what would be needed to support ASGI apps so that I can run my Python FastAPI/ASGI apps directly from Caddy?

We’d need a pure-Go implementation. There are none that we’re aware of, and we’re not really equipped to write one, really.

A third party plugin could use CGO if it needs, but it wouldn’t be possible to add to the Download Caddy page because it wouldn’t build on the build server unless it’s pure Go.

Generally though, pretty much everyone’s been using gunicorn or whatever alternative and reverse_proxying to it with Caddy. Best leave it to the purpose-built tooling to run your Python app.