HTTPS in a Caddyfile, and also Not Doing That

I ended up putting together a couple of Caddyfiles for the Caddy server.  The project really wants users to choose automatic HTTPS, but it wasn’t a good fit for using with a load balancer and auto-scaling.  Surprisingly, it is willing to contact the production Let’s Encrypt API even without an email address.

Anyway, I have a few pieces here to cover:

• The easiest way to ignore HTTPS, and returning a fixed error message on HTTP
• Mysterious error messages, relating to the way Caddy chooses certificates and configuration blocks
• Using the tls directive to get self-signed certificates for a public name, for using HTTPS between Caddy and a load balancer which does not validate certificates
• How to use trusted_proxies—and a bit more trickery—so that, using HTTP behind a load balancer, PHP knows the client’s connection is HTTPS
• How to compose multiple URL mappings, and using a front controller for PHP apps

Aside from the above links, Caddy provides more conceptual documentation at the Automatic HTTPS article.

My end goal is to get FrankenPHP running, but as it is built on Caddy, I wanted to understand that part before moving ahead.

The System Is the Authority

This is the first post for Decoded Node that has been written with league/commonmark instead of erusev/parsedown.  This technically aligns the Markdown implementation between this blog and my personal website (where CommonMark was readily integrated with Twig.)  Which is fancy talk for:

• Footnote-style link syntax works on both sites now
• Smart quotes are automated, instead of using platform-dependent input methods, or UniCycle

UniCycle “works,” but it’s not maintained (AFAICS), and the implementation strikes me as a bit of a hack.  It works fine in insert mode, but r' won’t replace with smart quote.  It’s a shame, because it has such a great name.

(Also along the way, I decided that .md won, so this processor no longer accepts anything like .mkd or .mdown.  Makes things easier than asking, “does this file match /\.ma?r?k?do?w?n$/?”)

Didn’t the Title Mention… Authority?

What strikes me about this is that “the format which I author in” is only incompletely described as “Markdown."  This particular move was feasible because league/commonmark is effectively a superset of erusev/parsedown.  If I decided I wanted to go back, I would have to edit all the new features out of newer posts.  Actually, if I want to update an old post and I happened to miss a smart quote in it, the non-smart quotes would also be changed by using the new parser.

What actually defines the output is not only the input, but the exact tool used to create it.

(I’m thrashing around in the direction of “the purpose of a system is what it does” and Hyrum’s Law, but neither of those things fit.)

That wouldn’t be much of an observation if I were saying, “An XLST processor doesn’t turn my Markdown into HTML,” but I didn’t really expect the choice of Markdown tool to matter so much to processing Markdown input.

Maybe it could be phrased as, “Markdown processors are not bug-for-bug compatible.”

Version Note

I use this code to write posts, not to mess around with code, so it’s not always clear whether the Markdown parser is up-to-date.  However, it seems I was using Parsedown 1.7.4 which is, at the time of writing this post, the latest stable release.  1.8.0 is in beta, and 2.0.0 seems to be barely started.

Observations of Liquid Glass

The effect is very nice.  I don’t use it on my personal phone.  Reduce Motion inhibits the glassiness, and having motion on a phone that I actually use a lot is annoying.  I loathe waiting for an animation to finish before I am Permitted to interact with anything.

Clear icons aren’t… bad.  Unless they’re dark.  Then they’re not clear anymore, which makes me wonder if people in Cupertino actually understand their own language.  I don’t use clear icons on my personal phone, because I like the auto-dark mode.  Ironically, between color filters to greyscale (to make the phone less attention-hogging) and Reduce Motion, normal icons are not that far off their clear counterparts.

On the impersonal phone, clear icons and Liquid Glass look pretty nice together, at least on the iOS 26 wallpapers.  I have them set to “always light” due to their lackluster dark variants, but they look fine that way when the rest of the phone is in dark mode.

Opening an app brings up a solid-background splash screen, and app.  There’s so much 💖new💖 look, until it is touched, and then the glass disappears.  A subconscious wrongness suffuses it.  Apple took it halfway.  They Microsoft’ed it.  I can use it, but it keeps me wondering… why?

Update: [2025-11-15] I experimentally turned off Reduce Motion on my personal phone, and sometimes, the motion gets really confused.  This makes everything jittery with the phone held as still as humanly possible, like it’s had three cups of coffee.  It looks like the effect that I saw sometimes with Reduce Motion on, where the line above the dock would flicker, but with everything at once.

I also found out that icon customization is somehow tied to the screen layout or focus.  I made icons clear in Sleep mode, and they remained non-clear outside of Sleep.  I like this result, but the UI doesn’t make it clear where the setting applies.

Sometimes, the Apple apps in my sleep focus screen turn into empty-app indicators.  No reminders, notes, or music for the night!  But third-party apps are fine.  I cannot fathom how the first-party systems could exhibit such poor results.

I can use it, but there are so many rough edges, I keep wondering… why?