Redirect all undefined subdomains using Caddy

Question

Let's say my Caddyfile defines two sites: a.example.com and b.example.com.

What should I do so that any subdomain other than these two is redirected to a.example.com? For example, going to c.example.com or xyz.example.com should redirect to a.example.com

In other words, I want something like a 404 rule but for non-existent subdomains rather than non-existent files.

Answer 1

Point your DNS A/AAAA records for *.example.com to your server.

a.example.com {
    # handle here
}
b.example.com {
    # handle here
}
*.example.com {
    redir https://a.example.com
}

You handle the a.example.com and b.example.com domains as you normally would, and set up a redir for *.example.com to https://a.example.com. Note that Caddy will automatically setup a redirect from http to https so that isn't needed.

Because you are using a wildcard domain in your Caddyfile, you can either use Caddy's on-demand TLS (which will fetch a certificate for that subdomain whenever such a request is received) or use a wildcard certificate (which requires the DNS challenge).

On-demand TLS

*.example.com {
    tls {
        on_demand
    }
}

There are some pitfalls to this approach which make wildcard certificates more attractive:

• Clients can abuse the setup to get as many certificates as they want, resulting in disk / memory exhaustion.
• Rate limiting by certificate authorities

Wildcard certificates

*.example.com {
    tls {
        dns cloudflare {env.CLOUDFLARE_AUTH_TOKEN}
    }
}

To use the DNS challenge, you need to

1. Use a nameserver that supports programmatic access
2. Build Caddy with a provider for that nameserver configured. For example, for Cloudflare you could build with https://github.com/caddy-dns/cloudflare (xcaddy build master --with github.com/caddy-dns/cloudflare) and save the token in the environment variable CLOUDFLARE_AUTH_TOKEN.