Prevent automatic http-to-https redirect

Occasionally while developing a web app locally, you need to build an isolated feature that requires https (such as a service worker). Using a self-signed certificate locally introduces the annoyance of Chrome returning an error every few hours that says Your connection is not private.

It would be nice to only deal with those self-signed https warnings when you absolutely needed to use https, then access the site warning-free via http the rest of the time. However, Caddy automatically adds an http-to-https redirect for all domain site addresses.

You can prevent the automatic redirection from http-to-https by listing both http and https addresses at the beginning of the site block:

http://mysite.test, https://mysite.test {
	# bind allows access to containers from host when running Caddy in Docker
	bind 0.0.0.0

	# Issue a self-signed certificate for development
	tls internal

	respond "Hello, world! I am being accessed from {scheme}."
}

Do not use this configuration in production. There are very few responsible reasons to serve an http version of your production site. Only use this configuration for development.

Alternatively, you can disable http-to-https redirects for all sites in your Caddyfile by adding the following block to the top of your Caddyfile (as seen in this GitHub issue):

{
    auto_https disable_redirects
}

Don’t run this configuration in production either.

Gotchas

When developing locally, you may need to add the domains to your system’s hosts file if they aren’t already there.