I’ve been trying to get a wildcard certificate for my domain for use in Caddy…
i’ve got caddy installed and working fine but it seems i need to build caddy manually to include the cloudflaredns module?
My issue is that i installed caddy using apt… so i’m not really sure what i’m meant to do now…
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Wildcards are usually generated via a DNS-01 challenge, which are unrelated to the web-server you are using. Maybe Caddy has a special function for it, but normally it wouldn’t be involved at all.
Caddy does have special support for DNS-01, but only if you compile in a module for your DNS provider.
The whole “build it yourself” strategy with plugins and stuff is why I moved over to Traefik. I think you’ll basically need to follow this doc to build it yourself while still using the apt package for all the niceties like Systemd units and such.
I was a bit weirded out by this as well, but honestly - it’s pretty straightforward and has been working just fine for me. shrug
You usually don’t actually need to build it yourself: you can get a binary with that module from the official download page which automates (and IIRC caches) the build.
However, as noted at the top of that page, there’s currently an issue where that page occasionally fails, which is unfortunate.
If the download actually works… which i’ll try in a minute… how can i move from my apt installed version to using this binary?
Edit… so i’ve ended up with a file with no extension…
caddy_linux_amd64_custom
That file is your new binary Caddy binary, assuming your server is an x64 Linux machine.
Using that should follow mostly the same procedure as if you’ve built it yourself, following the doc @[email protected] posted above, except you probably need to
chmod +x
that first, and maybechown
it too. (This is because your browser wisely does not mark files downloaded from the Internet as executable, and almost certainly does not run as root either)Disclaimer: I’ve always used docker images instead and have not tested this. But I think it should work, assuming those docs are correct for the self-built case.
Move that file to your server (if necessary) and open a terminal in the directory where you’ve placed it. Then execute these commands:
chmod +x caddy_linux_amd64_custom sudo chown root:root caddy_linux_amd64_custom sudo dpkg-divert --divert /usr/bin/caddy.default --rename /usr/bin/caddy sudo mv ./caddy_linux_amd64_custom /usr/bin/caddy.custom sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/caddy caddy /usr/bin/caddy.default 10 sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/caddy caddy /usr/bin/caddy.custom 50
If Caddy is already running you’ll probably want to restart it using
sudo systemctl restart caddy
.
When a new version of Caddy comes out it won’t update the binary (because it has been diverted), so to update it manually you’ll need to redo a few of the steps:
Download (and transfer if necessary) a new binary, then from a terminal:
chmod +x caddy_linux_amd64_custom sudo chown root:root caddy_linux_amd64_custom sudo mv ./caddy_linux_amd64_custom /usr/bin/caddy.custom
(Plus again
sudo systemctl restart caddy
if it’s already running)
Typing all this out makes me so glad Watchtower exists for my Docker containers. I just made a Github Action to do a daily rebuild of Caddy with my modules, put that image name in my
docker-compose.yaml
, and Watchtower takes care of the rest.Thank you for this… i need to take some time to read it more thoroughly… though your approach with Docker though will likely make a lot more sense for my environment.
Docker is also a bit tricky, because to use a custom binary you need to build a custom image. But if you don’t mind manually installing updates it’s not too bad.
I had it running but it didn’t seem to be issuing wildcards… but afterwards i realised that whilst i had told it to use the cloudflare API… i don’t think at any stage i’d actually told it to issue wildcards… i guess i need to figure out how to do that…
I’m questioning my need though really… i think the docs say it’s not recommended unless you’re dealing with thousands of subdomains…