How To Install Caddy on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Caddy on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The Caddy web server is an open-source web server written in Go. It is designed around simplicity and security that comes with a number of features that are useful for hosting websites. Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Caddy web server on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Caddy on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Caddy on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Install Caddy from the official website.

Installing this package automatically starts and runs Caddy for you as a systemd service named caddy using our official caddy.service unit file:

sudo apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key' | sudo apt-key add -
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install caddy

• Install Caddy via Snap.

sudo snap install caddy --edge

Step 3. Configure Caddy.

Now we create a directory for your website files:

mkdir -p /var/www/html/your-domain.com

Next, open Caddy’s configuration file and add your domain name, and change the web site’s root directory:

nano /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Replace: 80 with your domain name and change the site root to /var/www/html/your-domain.com

Restart the Caddy server to apply the changes:

sudo systemctl reload caddy

Step 3. Configure Firewall.

If you are using UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall), you need to configure it to allow access to HTTP and HTTPS ports for the server to work:

sudo ufw allow http
sudo ufw allow https

Step 4. Accessing Caddy webs server.

Once successfully completed the setup, Now navigate to your browser and enter your server IP or domain name:

http://your-domain.com

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Caddy. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Caddy web server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Caddy website.