Combining Caddy with Nginx | Thomas Bensmann

If you have needs beyond what Caddy offers, you setup a reverse proxy to Nginx. Let’s look at an example where you would use Nginx for caching. I also added a separate block, in case you want to pass reverse proxy it back to Caddy again.

You may wonder, wouldn’t it be simpler to just run Nginx in that case? Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on your needs.

In the example below I have a WordPress configuration where you could easily switch between passing the request to Nginx and passing it straight to PHP. You would simply change with_nginx to without_nginx. It also shows how you could support for purging URLs for the nginx cache, without exposing the purge URLs beyond access for localhost.

	(common) {
	header -Server
	encode gzip zstd
	}

	(with_nginx) {

	@purge {
	path /purge/*
	not remote_ip 127.0.0.1
	}

	redir @purge /

	reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8080
	}

	(without_nginx) {
	php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock
	file_server

	log {
	output file /var/log/caddy/access.log
	}

	@disallowed {
	path /xmlrpc.php
	path *.sql
	path /wp-content/uploads/*.php
	}

	rewrite @disallowed '/'
	}

	mydomain.com {
	root * /var/www/html/public
	import common

	# use nginx for caching
	import with_nginx
	}

	# you could direct nginx back here
	mydomain.com:8081 {
	root * /var/www/html/public
	import common
	import without_nginx
	}