Ask Claude to Write Nginx or Caddy Server Configs

Web server config is fiddly and full of footguns. Describe your deployment requirements and let Claude write a config that actually handles the edge cases correctly.

"Write an Nginx server block for a Laravel app:
- Domain: app.example.com with automatic www redirect
- PHP-FPM on socket /run/php/php8.3-fpm.sock
- Gzip compression for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Cache-Control: immutable headers for hashed asset filenames
- Rate limit the /api/ prefix to 60 requests/minute per IP
- X-Forwarded-For handling for requests behind a load balancer"

The settings that are easy to forget — try_files order for SPAs, client_max_body_size for file uploads, real_ip_header behind proxies — Claude gets right the first time and explains each directive so you understand what you're deploying.

location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|woff2)$ {
    expires max;
    add_header Cache-Control "public, immutable";
    access_log off;
}

For Caddy users, the same prompt style produces a Caddyfile instead. Caddy handles TLS automatically, so the config is shorter — but rate limiting, compression, and cache headers still need to be explicit.

Include your server's PHP version, whether you're behind Cloudflare, and any path-specific rules upfront. The more specific your prompt, the less back-and-forth.

Web server configs have a dozen easy-to-miss directives — get Claude to write one you'll actually want to put in version control.