Serve a Zola site using Caddy

on 2025-03-03 |  2 minute read

Table of Contents

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To serve a Zola site using Caddy, simply ==configure Caddy to serve the static files generated by your Zola build process within the designated root directory==, leveraging Caddy's "file_server" directive to deliver the static content directly to visitors; essentially treating your Zola site like any other static website.

Key steps:

  • Build your Zola site: Run your Zola build command to generate the static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files in the designated output directory.
  • Caddy configuration:
    • Create a Caddyfile:
yourdomain.com {
    root /path/to/zola/output_directory
    file_server
    gzip
}

Explanation:

  • yourdomain.com: Replace with your actual domain name.
  • root /path/to/zola/output_directory: Point this to the directory where your Zola build generated static files.
  • file_server: Tells Caddy to serve static files from the specified root directory.
  • gzip: Optionally enable Gzip compression for better performance.

Alternatively run a different http service and just have caddy reverse proxy it. Something like :

# reverse proxy approach. if service is running locally on http
blog.cielago.xyz {
   reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8090
}

Start Caddy:

Run the Caddy command to start the server, which will now serve your Zola site using the configured domain.

systemctl start caddy.service

Benefits of using Caddy for Zola:

Automatic HTTPS:

Caddy automatically handles Let's Encrypt certificate management, providing secure HTTPS connections by default.

Simple configuration:

The Caddyfile syntax is considered user-friendly, making it easy to set up a Zola site. 

Performance optimizations:

Caddy can automatically optimize static file delivery with features like caching and compression.

Server commands

(re)start the caddy service

systemctl restart caddy.service

Tail the logs

journalctl -xeu caddy.service

References