Table of Contents

Caddy Must Proxy Coolify Directly, Not via Traefik

Status: Resolved\ Date: 2026-05-27\ Affected service: Caddy, Coolify

Symptom

deploy.folk.zone returned errors after GoToSocial was added to the stack and Caddy was restarted. All other services continued to work.

Misdiagnosis

The Cloudflare tunnel uses remote configuration from the dashboard, not the local cloudflared/config.yml ingress rules. Several changes were made to the remote config that did not fix the issue and introduced new failures:

  1. Routed deploy.folk.zone directly to http://172.18.0.1:8000 (Coolify's host port, bypassing Caddy) — timed out due to firewall
  2. Removed deploy.folk.zone from the tunnel entirely — 404
  3. Put it back as http://caddy:80 (correct) — deploy still broken due to the Caddyfile issue below

Root Cause

The Caddyfile @deploy handler was proxying to 172.18.0.1:80 — the Docker host gateway, where Coolify's Traefik proxy listens. However, Traefik has no route configured for deploy.folk.zone, so it returned 404 for every request. 

# Inside cafe-caddy-1 container — confirmed Traefik returns 404
wget -qO- --header 'Host: deploy.folk.zone' http://172.18.0.1:80
# → HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

Key Architectural Fact

The coolify container is connected to both the coolify Docker network and cafe_cafe_net. This means Caddy can reach Coolify directly by service name without going through Traefik at all. 

# Confirmed — Coolify responds directly on cafe_cafe_net
docker inspect coolify --format '{{json .NetworkSettings.Networks}}'
# cafe_cafe_net: 172.18.0.7
# coolify:       172.19.0.5

Fix

Changed the @deploy handler in caddy/Caddyfile to proxy directly to coolify:8080 instead of routing through Traefik: 

# Before (broken — Traefik has no route for deploy.folk.zone)
@deploy host deploy.folk.zone
handle @deploy {
    reverse_proxy 172.18.0.1:80
}
 
# After (working — proxy directly to Coolify container)
@deploy host deploy.folk.zone
handle @deploy {
    reverse_proxy coolify:8080
}

Reloaded Caddy config without a full restart: 

docker exec cafe-caddy-1 caddy reload --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Verification

# From inside the caddy container
docker exec cafe-caddy-1 wget -qO- --header 'Host: deploy.folk.zone' http://localhost:80
# → Returns Coolify HTML (dark theme login page)
 
# From the host
curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' -H 'Host: deploy.folk.zone' http://localhost:8082
# → 302 (Coolify login redirect — correct)

See Also