Webflow + selfserved Ghost blog with Caddy

Modern SaaS applications usually run a landing page, blog, and the main app separately. For a landing page, you may want to use Tilda, Webflow, or other web-builders. For a blog, it’s common to use self-hosted CMS such as WordPress, Ghost, or others.

It’s crucially important to index the main domain <your_domain>.com instead of a subdomain blog.<your_domain>.com for SEO purposes. You want as many links to your main domain as possible. The more content on <your_domain>.com/blog, the more Google will index it.

Running Ghost blog on a subdomain such as blog.<your_domain>.com is easy, just create a new A-record in your DNS provider and point it to a machine with running Ghost instance. If you want to run <your_domain>.com on a Webflow and <your_domain>.com/blog being self-hosted Ghost you need a reverse-proxy server.

From a devops point of view our goals are:

1. <your_domain>.com -> Webflow
2. <your_domain>.com/* -> Webflow
3. <your_domain>.com/blog -> self hosted Ghost blog
4. blog.<your_domain>.com -> <your_domain>.com/blog

We’re going to use Caddy for reverse-proxy. The reason is Docker-friendly config, super fast to deploy without deep knowledge of devops (hey, Nginx). Find the official Caddy image here. Caddy needs you to mount volumes for proper working.

We’ll host Ghost and Caddy on the same machine and in a single docker-compose.yml file.

version: "3.7"
 
services:
 caddy:
   image: caddy:2
   restart: unless-stopped
   ports:
     - "80:80"
     - "443:443"
   volumes:
     - $PWD/Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile
     - $PWD/site:/srv
     - caddy_data:/data
     - caddy_config:/config
 ghost:
   image: ghost:3
   environment:
     NODE_ENV: production
     url: https://adapty.io/blog
   volumes:
     - ./blog:/var/lib/ghost/content
volumes:
 caddy_data:
 caddy_config:

Now for Caddyfile:

blog.adapty.io {
   redir https://adapty.io/blog{uri} #point to subdirectory
}
 
adapty.io {
   redir /blog /blog/ #trailing slash
   reverse_proxy /blog/* ghost:2368 { #proxy to Ghost container
       header_up Host {host}
   }
   reverse_proxy proxy.webflow.com { #proxy to Webflow
       header_up Host {host}
   }
}

Run docker-compose up -d and here you go!

By default, Caddy passes thru incoming headers to the backend—including the Host header—without modifications, with two exceptions:

• It adds or augments the X-Forwarded-For header field.
• It sets the X-Forwarded-Proto header field.

Read more in their docs https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/reverse_proxy#headers

Lastly,

Point A record for the main domain to your IP.

In Webflow turn off SSL proxy as Caddy will serve it for you automatically (very cool, yeah? Without a certbot).

That’s it!