Caddy – xyze.co.uk

I’d wanted to try Caddy web server for a while and upgrading to the latest version of WordPress on my website broke the site. Something to do with their WP Super Cache but I couldn’t find anything via Google nor was opening a support ticket useful so I decided to replace it with a new server.

As its a low traffic site I can do it on one of Google’s smallest servers, again using an e2-micro configured with Ubuntu 24.04 Minimal.

Caddy installation is detailed here: https://caddyserver.com/docs/install#debian-ubuntu-raspbian

sudo apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https curl
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key' | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/caddy-stable-archive-keyring.gpg
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install caddy

I then installed the stuff that I need that’s missing from Ubuntu Minimal:

sudo apt install bash-completion nano htop cron

I always change the history size in the shell so it keeps more, changing HISTSIZE=100000
HISTFILESIZE=20000:

nano .bashrc

With only 1GB ram, I always install zswap:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub.d/50-cloudimg-settings.cfg
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="console=ttyS0,115200 zswap.enabled=1 zswap.compressor=zstd zswap.zpool=zsmalloc"
sudo update-grub

sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo nano /etc/fstab
/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

sudo crontab -e
@reboot echo zstd > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/compressor

Use swapon or reboot to activate. For some reason the zswap compressor isn’t enabled at boot time, so the kludge in a crontab activates it.
It can be checked with:

grep -R . /sys/module/zswap/parameters

I normally configure swappiness which prevents kswapd kicking in and slowing everything down:

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf
vm.swappiness = 1

I got the latest WordPress and installed it in the usual place:

wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf latest.tar.gz
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html
sudo mv wordpress/ /var/www/html/
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/wordpress/

I then installed mysql and php:

sudo apt install mariadb-server php-apcu php-fpm php-mysql php-curl php-xml php-imagick php-mbstring php-zip php-gd php-intl

I then configured mysql:

sudo mysql_secure_installation
sudo mysql

CREATE USER "USER"@"localhost" IDENTIFIED BY "PASSWORD";
CREATE DATABASE xyze;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON xyze.* TO "USER"@"localhost";
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

This says that character set and collation are defaults so no need to specify explicitly: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/charset-server.html

Caddy comes with a sample config: /etc/caddy/Caddyfile which will display a sample webpage when tested in the browser. Searching Google for a config brought up: https://caddy.community/t/setting-up-wordpress-with-caddy-on-ubuntu/18448 which I’ve altered slightly:

xyze.co.uk {
	redir https://www.xyze.co.uk
}

www.xyze.co.uk {
    # good practice to signal on behalf of who 
    # are the certs getting issue
	tls [email protected]

    # logs are optional
	log {
		output file /var/log/caddy/xyze.co.uk
		format console
	}

	root * /var/www/html/wordpress
	encode zstd gzip
	file_server
	php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php-fpm.sock

	@disallowed {
		path /xmlrpc.php
		path *.sql
		path /wp-content/uploads/*.php
	}

	rewrite @disallowed '/index.php'
}

Letsencrypt is configured by Caddy automatically so no Certbot configuration is necessary. I then set up WordPress via the browser using the mysql config from earlier.

I then dumped the previous db and loaded it into the new one:

mysqldump -uUSER -pPASSWORD xyze > /var/www/html/wordpress/sql/wp-backup.sql
mysql -uUSER -pPASSWORD xyze < /var/www/html/wordpress/sql/wp-backup.sql

Logging into WordPress needed a db update and from there I configured the caching.
I’ve found that apcu is faster than Redis so have installed this one which needs the php-apcu I installed earlier:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/atec-cache-apcu/ This plugin gives opcache recommended settings: https://wordpress.org/plugins/atec-cache-info/ which are configured in:

sudo nano /etc/php/8.3/fpm/php.ini
sudo systemctl restart php8.3-fpm caddy

Unfortunately their page cache seems buggy and they’ve superseded it in one of their other plugins, so I’m using https://wordpress.org/plugins/powered-cache/ which I’ve used successfully before. The other plugin needed is the Cloudflare one which will update Cloudflare when a new post is made: https://wordpress.org/plugins/cloudflare/

I like to backup the db every night to make it ready for the external rsync backup:

sudo crontab -l

# m h  dom mon dow   command
@reboot echo zstd > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/compressor
35 0 * * * /usr/bin/mysqldump -uUSER -pPASSWORD xyze > /var/www/html/wordpress/sql/wp-backup.sql

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