Routing multiple paths to a reverse proxy using 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.

Comments

[Vaviloff]

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]

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:

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

The config I posted will only match against /posts or /post/*, which I think is the behavior that most people are expecting.

I realize that this isn't obvious, so I added a section about it in my post above. Thank you for the feedback: it made this post better 🙂

[Vaviloff]

You could shorten the config, but it may proxy requests to @webapp that you weren't expecting

Ah, that's actually a very good point indeed, thanks for making a note!