Static Website

Configuring Caddy to Serve a Static Website

A common task performed by a web server is to serve static websites.

A static website only requires that the HTML, CSS, JS, and media files (like .jpgs) need to be served as a part of the HTTP Response.

The syntax for a Caddyfile meant to serve a static website will look similar to the following:

localhost {
    root * /absolute/path/to/build/artifact/directory
    file_server
}

New Configuration File

A Caddyfile can technically live anywhere on the machine. Some people opt to store all of their Caddyfiles in /etc/caddy. This is similar to the best practice used by the NGINX web server.

Another practice is to store a Caddyfile with the source code of a project. For this example we will be deploying the Orbit Report angular project built in LC101 unit 1. We will be creating a Caddyfile near the source code of this project.

Warning

The Caddyfile can be stored in any location as long as your path is pointing to the correct build artifacts for the application you would like to deploy. When running the command caddy reload you must be in the directory containing the Caddyfile you want to load.

Create New Caddyfile

touch /home/student/Desktop/Caddyfile

Validation:

touch /home/student/Desktop/Caddyfile && ls /home/student/Desktop output

Add Configuration to Caddyfile

Using your preferred editor add the following configuration to the newly created Caddyfile:

http://localhost {
    root * /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report
    file_server
}

Configuration breakdown:

  • http://localhost: designated hostname and port to listen on
    • root * /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report: the root location for all requests coming to this server
    • file_server: static file_server directive instructing Caddy to serve the files found in the root location as files for any incoming requests

Clone Build Artifacts

The Caddyfile is expecting /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report to contain the artifacts (HTML, CSS, JS, media files) of this project.

As of now the directory doesn’t exist and the build artifacts are missing.

Luckily the build artifacts are stored on GitHub.

From your home directory:

git clone https://github.com/LaunchCodeTechnicalTraining/orbit-report-artifacts

From here you will want to move the contents of orbit-report-artifacts into /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report/.

Move Build Artifacts to /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report

Create /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report

mkdir /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report

Move all files in /home/student/orbit-report-artifacts/ into /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report:

mv /home/student/orbit-report-artifacts/* /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report/

Check the contents of /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report:

ls /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report/

Validation:

ls /home/student/Desktop/orbit-report output

Reload Configuration

cd ~/Desktop

caddy reload
Warning

If Caddy is not currently running you will need to start the caddy service with systemctl like:

sudo systemctl start caddy

Access Site

Make a web request to localhost.

localhost