There are many options for installing and configuring a web server. Some rely on virtualized environments, while others take advantage of inexpensive hardware such as the Raspberry Pi. But if your goal is to develop a site and test it quickly, or to limit its operation to an internal network, Caddy may be just what you need.
A compact local web server
Imagine you are developing a site and want to see how it will be rendered by different browsers before putting it live. Alternatively, imagine you are the administrator of an internal network, and you decide to create a small service that all terminals can access with a browser. Setting up a physical server for a web page seems excessive in such a case, and virtual servers demand a certain amount of time, despite their convenience. Fortunately, there are a huge number of options on the Web, and the vast majority of them are free. Today we came across Caddy, and in essence, we are dealing with a mini local web server that comes in under eight megabytes.
Getting Started on Windows
On the Windows version, all you have to do is download a copy of Caddy, drop the index file and the page structure into its folder, and double-click the executable. The address to access the page is localhost:2015, and if there is no strict firewall in the way, it should open immediately. This is one of the most basic ways to use Caddy. Its documentation mentions a file called Caddyfile, where you can set advanced parameters, such as the page name (instead of localhost:2015), and gzip compression, as well as serve PHP sites (with a touch of FastCGI) and experiment with HTTP/2.
More advanced users might wonder why anyone should use Caddy when robust tools like Apache and Nginx exist. In reality, what Caddy seeks is to reduce the technical complexity associated with configuring a web server, and given that it is a single executable, there is no doubt that it fulfills its goal perfectly. In the future, Caddy developers plan to add a web-based control panel (to make its use even easier), support for Let's Encrypt, and a remote administration API, among other things.
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