Run Caddy as a daemon

Manually install Caddy as a service on Linux with these instructions.

Requirements:

• caddy binary that you built with naïve fork of Caddy forwardproxy
• systemctl --version >= 232
• sudo privileges

Make Caddy executable and move caddy binary into your path, and place your Caddyfile under /etc/caddy/

$ chmod +x caddy
$ mv caddy /usr/bin/

$ mkdir /etc/caddy
$ mv Caddyfile /etc/caddy/

Test if it works:

$ /usr/bin/caddy run --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Create unique Linux group and user for caddy:

$ groupadd --system caddy

$ useradd --system \
    --gid caddy \
    --create-home \
    --home-dir /var/lib/caddy \
    --shell /usr/sbin/nologin \
    --comment "Caddy web server" \
    caddy

Next, create caddy.service under /etc/systemd/system/ with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=Caddy
Documentation=https://caddyserver.com/docs/
After=network.target network-online.target
Requires=network-online.target

[Service]
User=caddy
Group=caddy
ExecStart=/usr/bin/caddy run --environ --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
ExecReload=/usr/bin/caddy reload --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
TimeoutStopSec=5s
LimitNOFILE=1048576
LimitNPROC=512
PrivateTmp=true
ProtectSystem=full
AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Double-check the ExecStart and ExecReload directives. Make sure the binary's location and command-line arguments are correct for your installation. Change it according to your setup.

After saving the service file, we can now start the caddy service with systemd:

$ systemctl daemon-reload
$ systemctl enable caddy
$ systemctl start caddy

Check the current status:

$ systemctl status caddy

Reload caddy with changed config file:

$ systemctl reload caddy