Setup Caddy with PHP on Ubuntu

Introduction

Caddy is a very promising webserver (written in Go) that allows HTTP/2. It is a full-featured web server that includes the ability to enable HTTPS automatically. This allows for web server creation with high flexibility and low overhead. Creator claims caddy to be designed for human and it is probably the only of its kind. The purpose of Caddy is to streamline an authentic web development, deployment, and hosting workflow so that anyone can host their own web sites without requiring special technical knowledge. If you are designer, blogger and developer prefer to have a simple yet webserver with HTTP/2 support by default, Caddy is definitely worth checking out.

Installation

You can run auto Caddy installation instead of download the file archive by running the following code in your terminal.

curl https://getcaddy.com | bash

The command above will install caddy to /usr/local/bin/caddy

System Setup

Allow caddy to use standard internal network post

sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/local/bin/caddy

PHP Setup

Install PHP-fpm by running the following command:

PHP5

sudo apt-get install php5-fpm php5-cli curl

PHP7

sudo apt-get install php7.0-fpm php7.0-cli curl

Site Configuration

Create web server root directory to store all of your webpages like .php, .html, ect.

sudo mkdir -p /opt/www
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data

Caddy Configuration

Create the directory we’ll be using to store Caddyfile and ssl, give user perms to write to it:

sudo mkdir /etc/caddy
sudo chown -R root:www-data /etc/caddy
sudo mkdir /etc/ssl/caddy
sudo chown -R www-data:root /etc/ssl/caddy
chmod 0770 /etc/ssl/caddy

Create Caddyfile which the main configuration file of Caddy.

sudo vim /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Put the following code:

yourdomain.com {
root /opt/www
tls your@yourdomain.com.com
}

• root /opt/www : point the web server root directory to /opt/www
• tls your@yourdomain.com : configures HTTPS connections

To configure php settings with more granularity, you can use the fastcgi directive.

fastcgi / /var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock {
	ext 	.php
	split	.php
	index	index.php
}

• ext : if requested file has the .php extension use fastcgi proxy
• split : To store anything after .php in the PATH_INFO CGI variable
• index: To check for index.php if no file is specified in the URL

Note: Use the following socket path for PHP5

/var/run/php5-fpm.sock

Server Configuration

Now we create a systemd configuration file /etc/systemd/system/caddy.service, which looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Caddy HTTP/2 web server
Documentation=https://caddyserver.com/docs
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
[Service]
Restart=on-failure
User=www-data
Group=www-data
Environment=HOME=/etc/ssl/caddy
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/caddy -log stdout -agree=true -conf=/etc/caddy/Caddyfile -root=/var/tmp
ExecReload=/bin/kill -USR1 $MAINPID
LimitNOFILE=4096
LimitNPROC=64
PrivateTmp=true
PrivateDevices=true
ProtectHome=true
ProtectSystem=full
ReadWriteDirectories=/etc/ssl/caddy
CapabilityBoundingSet=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
NoNewPrivileges=true
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Testing PHP

With a Caddy web server configured and the PHP packages installed, we should be able to verify that PHP is up and running. Begin by checking the installed version of PHP at the command line:

$ php -v
PHP 7.0.8-0ubuntu0.16.04.2 (cli) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
	with Zend OPcache v7.0.8-0ubuntu0.16.04.2, Copyright (c) 1999-2016, by Zend Technologies

You can also create a test file in the web server root directory, which is /opt/www

Using Vim, create the file called into.php in the web server root directory

sudo vim /opt/www/tes.php

Paste the following code into tes.php

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Exit and save tes.php from your editor. Now, load the following address in your browser:

https://yourdomain.com/tes.php

You should see PHP version and configuration info for PHP. Once you’ve double-checked this, it’s safest to to delete testing file.

sudo rm -r /opt/www/tes.php

CONCLUSION

Now, you have working Caddy web server with PHP feature.

Source: http://oonlab.com/code/2016/08/12/setup-caddy-on-ubuntu-to-work-with-php/ — Rizky’s blog