acmez VS caddy-json-schema

CertMagic uses https://github.com/mholt/acmez because lego has significant problems that made it inflexible and unreliable for use in Caddy. See the History section on that repo for an explanation.

Because Lego maintainers wouldn't budge when Caddy needed changes made to increase ACME reliability. Matt wrote his own implementation https://github.com/mholt/acmez and started using that in Caddy soon after. There's a deeper explanation here: https://github.com/caddyserver/certmagic/issues/71

I am really proud of how elegant and well-documented ACMEz is: https://github.com/mholt/acmez

Thanks for recommending it!

I hear ya. The JSON config is definitely not trivial. I wrote our JSON docs and strove to made them easy to follow. You can traverse into the module structure piece-by-piece here: https://caddyserver.com/docs/json/

There is also a Caddy plugin by @abiosoft that can generate a JSON schema for your custom Caddy builds, which can then be used by IDEs to give you autocomplete and validation: https://github.com/abiosoft/caddy-json-schema

I also sometimes recommend writing your config by hand in the Caddyfile, then using `caddy adapt` to get the JSON equivalent. (It might not always be the prettiest JSON, since the adapter is only so smart.) But then you can fine-tune the JSON a little easier, possibly. Hope that helps!