Tyler Smith

Posted on Jan 21, 2024 • Edited on Dec 30, 2024 • Originally published at caddyexamples.com

Routing multiple paths to a reverse proxy using Caddy

#caddy

Sometimes your app will need to route a handful of paths to one service and all other paths to another. Caddy's named matchers allow you to define a set of path directives then route them all to a single reverse proxy.

:80 {
    bind 0.0.0.0
    encode zstd gzip
    @webapp {
        path /
        path /posts /posts/*
        path /tags /tags/*
        path /static /static/*
    }

    handle @webapp {
        reverse_proxy webapp:3000
    }
    handle {
        reverse_proxy wordpress:80
    }
}

Alternatively, you can omit the handle blocks:

:80 {
    bind 0.0.0.0
    encode zstd gzip
    @webapp {
        path /
        path /posts /posts/*
        path /tags /tags/*
        path /static /static/*
    }

    reverse_proxy @webapp webapp:3000
    reverse_proxy wordpress:80
}

You may wonder why we're matching most path directives against two different routes, using path /posts /posts/* instead of path /posts*.

Using path /posts* could include paths that you don't intend to proxy. If we used path /posts* and path /static*, we would also match on the following routes:

/postscript
/posts-authors
/static-electricity
/static-site-generators

This may be the desired behavior in your application, but it's probably not.

Top comments (3)

Vaviloff • Dec 30 '24

Thanks, that was very useful!

You could also shorten this config a little, for example to match both /path and /path/*, simply write /path*:

    @webapp {
        path /
        path /posts*
        path /tags*
        path /static*
    }

Tyler Smith • Dec 30 '24

Hey Vaviloff, I'm glad you found the post useful!

You could shorten the config, but it may proxy requests to @webapp that you weren't expecting. With the configuration you posted, the following routes would also be proxied to @webapp: