caddy static site with root in user's home directory causes permission errors

On a recently started droplet running Ubuntu 24.10 I installed Caddy following the standard procedure given in the Caddy docs for Ubuntu. I did not follow the DigitalOcean tutorial for installing Caddy on Ubuntu 22.04.

I have created an user for day-to-day running of the server. I have the Caddyfile

xxxx.com {
  encode zstd gzip
  root * /home/username/blog
  file_server
}

This file is in /etc/caddy and is owned by root.

When I have debug at the top of Caddyfile, journalctl shows that there are permission errors when the root of the static site is accessed.

When I move the static site to /var/www/ and modify the Caddyfile accordingly everything works.

In contrast to the instructions given in the above mentioned tutorial /var/www and all sub directories in it are owned by root (and not caddy) and everything works.

All directories in my static site have a permission of 775 and all files a permission of 664.

Despite going through many tutorials and comments I have no idea why I have the permission errors when the static site is in the user’s home directory.

Any help or pointers would be appreciated. Thanks.