---
title: Welcome
---

# Caddy Welcomes You

Caddy is a powerful, extensible platform to serve your sites, services, and apps, written in Go. Although most people use it as a web server or proxy, it is an excellent choice for a:

- web server
- reverse proxy
- sidecar proxy
- load balancer
- API gateway
- ingress controller
- system manager
- process supervisor
- task scheduler
- (any long-running process)

and operates primarily at L4 (transport layer) and L7 (application layer) of the [OSI model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model), though it has the ability to work with other layers.

Configuration is both dynamic and exportable with [Caddy's API](/docs/api). Although no config files required, you can still use them; most people's favorite way of configuring Caddy is using the [Caddyfile](/docs/caddyfile). The format of the config document takes many forms with [config adapters](/docs/config-adapters), but Caddy's native config language is [JSON](/docs/json/).

Caddy compiles for all major platforms and has no runtime dependencies.