Web / Caddy Server Interview questions
Why doesn't Caddy require a separate Certbot setup?
Certbot exists to bridge the gap between web servers that don't speak ACME natively (like traditional Nginx or Apache setups) and Let's Encrypt. Caddy closes that gap itself by embedding a full ACME client directly in the server process, through the CertMagic library.
Where a Certbot-based setup needs a separate installed tool, a cron job to trigger renewal, and a reload hook to make the web server pick up the new certificate file, Caddy's ACME client runs inside the same process that's serving traffic. It requests, validates, stores, and renews certificates as part of its normal lifecycle, then hot-swaps the active certificate in memory without any external trigger or restart.
This is why a from-scratch Caddy site with a public domain gets working HTTPS with zero additional commands, while achieving the same result with plain Nginx involves installing Certbot, running it once, and scheduling its renewal separately.
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