Use with an external Caddy Server

[AntonyStorti]

Hi everyone!

I am currently setting up the Caddy Proxy Manager using Docker, but my Caddy Server is running bare metal inside a separate LXC container (installed via official repo, not Dockerized).

I have successfully established the API communication by configuring the admin block in my Caddyfile and setting CADDY_API_URL to point to the LXC IP in my .env file.

My Current Setup:

Manager: Docker container (Host IP: 192.168.100.50)

Caddy Server: Bare-metal in LXC (IP: 192.168.100.100)

Status: curl -i http://192.168.100.100:2019/config/ from the Docker host works perfectly.

The Challenge:
The Manager expects Caddy logs and ACME data to be available via local bind mounts:
YAML

volumes:

• /root/servizi/caddy-manager/logs:/logs:ro
• /root/servizi/caddy-manager/caddy-data:/caddy-data:ro

Since Caddy is running bare metal on a different "machine" (LXC), these files (typically in /var/log/caddy/ and /var/lib/caddy/) are not naturally accessible to the Docker container. This results in an empty dashboard and no certificate visibility.

Questions for the Maintainers:

Is there a built-in way to handle remote log ingestion (e.g., via a sidecar, syslog, or Caddy API) without resorting to complex NFS/SSHFS mounts?

Does the Manager support reading ACME metadata (for the Certificates page) directly through the Caddy Admin API instead of scanning the filesystem?

Are there plans to better support "decoupled" architectures where the Manager and Caddy don't share the same filesystem?

I believe many users running Caddy on Proxmox LXCs or dedicated VMs would benefit from a more "network-native" way to sync this data.

Thanks for the amazing work!

[fuomag9]

Hello,

Unfortunately this would require re-architecturing the system, it's easier to just mount the folders remotely via NFS. Writes are not that much intensive so should be doable without any particular bottleneck.

Example:

# Source - https://stackoverflow.com/a/56631885
  ...
  services:
    example-app:
      volumes:
      - "nfs-data:/data"
  ...
  volumes:
    nfs-data:
      driver: local
      driver_opts:
        type: nfs
        o: nfsvers=4,addr=nfs.example.com,rw
        device: ":/path/to/dir"
  ...

[AntonyStorti]

I did as you said, but the manager doesn't find any of the Proxy Hosts I'd already manually created in my CaddyFile. Why?

[fuomag9]

I did as you said, but the manager doesn't find any of the Proxy Hosts I'd already manually created in my CaddyFile. Why?

The proxy hosts have to be created on the webui only, as that's the source of truth (the data is stored in the database and the json configuration is re-created every time from that), mixing with caddyfiles is not supported unfortunately