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woodpecker-ci/woodpecker
Woodpecker is a simple, yet powerful CI/CD engine with great extensibility.
Woodpecker is a self-hosted CI/CD engine, forked from Drone before Drone's license change, aimed at teams wanting a lightweight self-hosted pipeline runner integrated with Gitea, Forgejo, GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket. It's a good fit for people who want a straightforward YAML-based pipeline system without the operational weight of Jenkins or the vendor lock of hosted CI.
Multiple backend execution engines (Docker, Kubernetes, local, custom) give real deployment flexibility instead of being tied to one runtime. Low resource footprint (~100MB server, ~30MB agent) makes it viable for small self-hosted setups, unlike heavier CI systems. Broad forge support (Gitea, Forgejo, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Bitbucket Datacenter) is actually maintained, not just stubbed. CLI, extensions for config/registry/secret providers, and gRPC agent protocol show a genuinely extensible architecture, not just a plugin marketplace bolted on.
Documentation is spread across many small numbered markdown files which makes it hard to get a single coherent picture of setup before you're deep into config specifics. The YAML pipeline syntax is Woodpecker-specific, so migrating from GitHub Actions or GitLab CI configs isn't a drop-in job. Kubernetes backend and autoscaler docs suggest this is less battle-tested than the Docker backend for production scale-out. Coming from a Drone fork means some rough edges in the original design (matrix builds, multi-forge quirks) may still linger despite the rebrand.