I would not directly expose Jellyfin to the Internet (including reverse proxy) because of security issues they’ve had. And no, a reverse proxy (like Caddy) doesn’t usually add much insecurity or security^.

The thing I currently do is use forward_auth w/ Authelia (from anywhere, you could also use basic_auth though the UX sucks) but bypass it for the app in private IP ranges (aka at home or in VPN):

jellyfin.example {
        @notapp {
                not {
                        header User-Agent *Jellyfin*
                        client_ip private_ranges
                }
        }

        forward_auth @notapp localhost:8080 {
                uri /api/verify?rd=https://authelia.example/
        }
        reverse_proxy 192.168.1.44:8080
}

Apps get to continue working, and I can access it from my phone without a VPN setup (because it’s annoying and I only look at metadata on my phone anyway).

You can also do a simpler config (which I used to do) where you just give an HTTP Unauthorized for anything outside of private ranges (this lets you do the HTTP challenge for a certificate while still not exposing Jellyfin to the general internet).

^You can configure more security by doing authentication in the reverse proxy so that anyone trying to attack services behind it must first authenticate with the reverse proxy, but this is not the default. Security-wise this ends up similar to forcing all access through a VPN first, if a little harder to setup.

The documentation it’s surprisingly bad at explaining common patterns of use.

It is also a bit thicker compared to nginx or HAproxy.

Caddy is very basic, and thats why it works so easily. There is nothing wrong with it.

However it lacks some features that other reverse proxies offer. But if you dont need any of those, use Caddy.

Additional security? Not directly. But fail2ban and CrowdSec are easily set up too. And Caddy also combines very well with Authelia for authentication.

It just runs… Two years straight. Some more services since start of caddy… No worries.

Recently added auth with authelia… Still straight forward.

Easy setup, always online. That’s it. Period.

I switched from Traefik to Caddy a few years ago and have no ragrets. The only complaints I have about Caddy:

• It doesn’t support configuring virtual hosts automatically via docker labelsl (like Traefik).
• Many features (like DNS auth for certs) require compiling Caddy. Which is easy but annoying.

Used Caddy for years and after a week of Nginx Proxy Manager I never went back to Caddy.

it is what you mean…no less no more…Caddy rocks…

It’s no different than NGiNX, put in your config and it just works.

What is it? Is it an alternative to unraid?

Caddy is a great, easy web server. It honestly has some pretty good performance too. If you want to see some good tests against nginx, take a look at this:

https://blog.tjll.net/reverse-proxy-hot-dog-eating-contest-caddy-vs-nginx/

tldr: Optimized nginx does outperform caddy in some areas in under heavy load, and they have a completely different strategies to handle failure. Under very heavy load Nginx just starts dropping and refusing connections to keep itself fast, while caddy will dramatically slow down response times in order to keep failures from happening.

Can somebody explain in plain English what it is used for?

How do you compare Caddy with nginx proxy manager?

After using Nginx for almost a decade, Caddy is pretty damn awesome regarding how simple it is. I don’t need 8-10 lines of code to setup an SSL secured reverse proxy, I need three.

It is a simple layer 7 proxy and nothing more. It is the simplest so it works. As a comparison, almost all other reverse proxies can handle layer 4 traffic.

and I don’t miss the label feature of traefik at all. centralized config for an entrance gateway is so much easier to maintain and find security flaws. I think labeling would be useful only in production clusters with thousands of microservices that you absolutely need the reverse of control to get away from dependency hell. Otherwise, I advice against using such feature, not even with a caddy plugin. (I mean if you really need it, why not just use traefik…)

Caddy is great, been using it for a long time and made the switch from v1 to v2. The biggest negative, IMO, is that examples are usually for NGINX. This is fine if all you have to do is to translate the nginx 5-liner into a Caddy 1-liner, but for nextcloud, the code was a bit more complicated and required some googling (as people had that issue before and their forums are helpful).

LLMs can also be useful for translating nginx directives to caddy.