While waiting for the forum to come back online over the w/e, I started doodling. I was thinking about Caddy and why it hasn’t had more of an impact on the internet. Don’t get me wrong. Caddy has a strong following. However, I still see lots of evidence of very clever people bashing their heads against the wall trying to get something working with more traditional proxy approaches that would be trivial in Caddy. I wondered why they were either unaware of or; weren’t considering Caddy as a modern alternative. So this is what I did to try to come up with an answer…
I considered several applications I use that require proxy services and searched their support documentation for the number of times a specific proxy server was mentioned. It’s a small sample set of applications, but I’m pretty confident the findings will extrapolate out to other popular applications as well. This is what I came up with…
Yeah, I mean, aside from the fact that we don’t use every app out there (I use only a couple of them – and yes I have in fact contributed documentation for using Caddy with those), it’s not very compelling for the developers of a piece of software to say, “Hey I made this, can you add this to your docs?” It sounds a bit self promotional. Where’s the evidence that people actually use it?
It’s much better for someone else to say, “Hey I use this, can you add this to your docs.”
Maybe it would be interesting to compile a list of links to places that list specific configurations for other servers and encourage community members with an interest in the specific tech to go create an equivalent configuration for Caddy?
Certainly, this was my problem when trying to use Caddy with Node-RED. There are plenty of examples for using Apache and NGINX but there were none for Caddy.
I think this is a great idea! Once we’ve got a conversion process that’s tested, sound and that the forum moderators agree to, the plan is to create a wiki guide for it. Within the thread of the process guide, community members can contribute to that list.
Thinking out aloud. Maybe the list takes the form of one post per application page of interest. Members can ‘vote’ for the conversion of an application page by liking its post. Posts with lots of likes would suggest that there’s a lot of interest in creating a Caddy equivalent page for that application page. Community members can then choose individually or collectively to work together, and with the help of the very helpful Caddy staff who oversee this forum, transform that page. Just an early idea at this stage.
