PHP 8.4 on Caddy on Debian 13… in Three Minutes

I just needed to spin up a new PHP webserver and I was amazed how fast and easy it was, nowadays. I mean: Caddy already makes it pretty easy, but I was delighted to see that, since the last time I did this, the default package repositories had 100% of what I needed!

Apart from setting the hostname, creating myself a user and adding them to the sudo group, and reconfiguring sshd to my preference, I’d done nothing on this new server. And then to set up a fully-functioning PHP-powered webserver, all I needed to run (for a domain “example.com”) was:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y caddy php8.4-fpm
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com
printf "example.com {\n"                               | sudo tee    /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "  root * /var/www/example.com\n"               | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "  encode zstd gzip\n"                          | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "  php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php8.4-fpm.sock\n" | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "  file_server\n"                               | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "}\n"                                           | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
sudo service caddy restart

After that, I was able to put an index.php file into /var/www/example.com and it just worked.

And when I say “just worked”, I mean with all the bells and whistles you ought to expect from Caddy. HTTPS came as standard (with a solid QualSys grade). HTTP/3 was supported with a 0-RTT handshake.

Mind blown.