Turning a Raspberry Pi into a DIY Caddy Reverse Proxy for Home‑Hosted Services

I’ve run a handful of services on a Pi for years—Plex, Nextcloud, Home Assistant—so the idea of putting a single, tidy entry point on top of them is pretty appealing. Caddy is the go‑to for this because it hands you a working HTTPS server, auto‑issues Let’s Encrypt certs, and runs nicely on ARM. Below is a hands‑on walk‑through that keeps all the commands and links intact, but reads like a coffee‑chat with a fellow sysadmin.

I’ve been running a small homelab for a few years now. My setup consists of a handful of services—Nextcloud, Home Assistant, a personal blog, and a few static sites—all exposed through a single reverse proxy on a Raspberry Pi 4. For the first two years I used Nginx because it’s ubiquitous, well‑documented, and I could get it working with a simple proxy_pass block. In 2025 I started to notice a few friction points that made me consider alternatives. By the end of 2025 I had migrated to Caddy, and the switch has paid off in terms of maintenance, security, and ease of use.

Setting up Caddy as a reverse proxy for my home lab

I’ve been juggling a Plex server, Nextcloud, and a little Go API all on the same Ubuntu 24.04 box. The goal was simple: a tidy public URL for each service, automatic HTTPS, and as little upkeep as possible. Caddy 2.7 fit the bill perfectly—its ACME integration is a one‑liner, and it ships with HTTP/2 out of the box.

1. Install Caddy

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key' | \
  sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/caddy-stable-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/caddy-stable-archive-keyring.gpg] \
  https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/deb/debian any main" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y caddy

Caddy boots as a systemd service automatically. Just double‑check that it’s listening on the web ports: