Woodpecker CI: a lightweight, self-hosted CI engine with container-based pipelines

Woodpecker CI (about 8,000 stars on GitHub) is a community-maintained continuation of the open source Drone CI, licensed under Apache-2.0. A server component talks to your Git forge and shows the web UI; one or more agents pick up jobs and run each pipeline step as a container with Docker, Podman or Kubernetes. The server is a single Go binary with an embedded SQLite database by default, so a complete CI system fits on a small VM.

Choose it when you host your own Git (Gitea, Forgejo, GitLab) or want CI you fully control next to GitHub, and you like the model of “every step is a container image plus commands”. Pipelines are YAML files in the repository under .woodpecker/ or a single .woodpecker.yaml:

when:
  - event: [push, pull_request]
    branch: main

steps:
  - name: test
    image: python:3.13
    commands:
      - pip install -r requirements.txt
      - pytest -v

  - name: lint
    image: python:3.13
    depends_on: []
    commands:
      - pip install ruff
      - ruff check .

Steps run in order unless depends_on makes them parallel; the when block filters by event, branch, path and more. Secrets, matrix builds, services (databases for tests), cron pipelines and plugins for Docker image builds and deployments are all available. To try it, the documentation provides a Docker Compose file: run woodpecker-server with the forge OAuth settings (WOODPECKER_GITHUB_CLIENT and WOODPECKER_GITHUB_SECRET for GitHub, or the Gitea and GitLab equivalents) and a shared WOODPECKER_AGENT_SECRET, then woodpecker-agent with access to the Docker socket.

docker compose up -d
docker compose logs -f woodpecker-server
curl -s http://localhost:8000/healthz

Log in through your forge, enable a repository, push a .woodpecker.yaml and the first pipeline starts. The woodpecker-cli tool from the same repository lints pipeline files locally with woodpecker-cli lint. Credit to the Woodpecker CI maintainers and contributors.