By Jagadish R
On a recently started droplet running Ubuntu 24.10 I installed Caddy following the standard procedure given in the Caddy docs for Ubuntu. I did not follow the DigitalOcean tutorial for installing Caddy on Ubuntu 22.04.
I have created an user for day-to-day running of the server. I have the Caddyfile
xxxx.com {
encode zstd gzip
root * /home/username/blog
file_server
}
This file is in /etc/caddy and is owned by root.
When I have debug at the top of Caddyfile, journalctl shows that there are permission errors when the root of the static site is accessed.
When I move the static site to /var/www/ and modify the Caddyfile accordingly everything works.
In contrast to the instructions given in the above mentioned tutorial /var/www and all sub directories in it are owned by root (and not caddy) and everything works.
All directories in my static site have a permission of 775 and all files a permission of 664.
Despite going through many tutorials and comments I have no idea why I have the permission errors when the static site is in the user’s home directory.
Any help or pointers would be appreciated. Thanks.
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Accepted Answer
Hey Jagadish!
The issue is related to permissions since Caddy runs as the caddy user by default. When you try to serve files from your home directory, the caddy user doesn’t have access.
This is typical for all webservers including Nginx and Apache as well.
The caddy user can access /var/www because it’s set up by default for system services. However, accessing files in /home/username needs additional permissions as the /home/username directories are owned by a different user and group.
To keep using your home directory, try this:
- Change ownership to the
cadyuser:sudo chown -R caddy:caddy /home/username/blog - Adjust permissions so that they are not too open:
sudo chmod -R 755 /home/username/blog - Reload Caddy:
sudo systemctl reload caddy
If you prefer not changing permissions in your home folder, you could then change the user as which the cady service runs as:
- Edit the Caddy systemd file:
sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/caddy.service - Change:
User=username Group=username - Reload and restart:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl restart caddy
In most cases, sticking to /var/www is usually best.
Let me know if this helps!
- Bobby
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