What is woodpecker?

Woodpecker is a tool that automates the work of building, testing, and deploying software. This kind of system is called a CI/CD engine, where CI stands for continuous integration (automatically checking that new code does not break things) and CD stands for continuous delivery (automatically shipping working code to where it needs to run). You define what steps should happen in a configuration file, and Woodpecker runs those steps every time code is pushed or a pull request is opened. The project is a community-maintained fork of an older open-source CI tool called Drone. It runs as two parts: a server that coordinates everything and stores state, and one or more agents that actually execute the pipeline steps inside containers. The default database is SQLite, which means you can start small without setting up a separate database. At idle, the server uses around 100 MB of RAM and each agent uses around 30 MB. Woodpecker is designed to be installed on your own infrastructure, giving you control over what runs and where. It works with Docker containers for pipeline steps, and can be deployed on Kubernetes as well. A plugin system lets you extend what pipelines can do. The main documentation site covers installation options and configuration in detail. The project is used in production by Codeberg, a privacy-focused Git hosting platform, as its primary CI/CD system. There is an active community with chat on Matrix and a translation effort for the web interface. Financial support comes through Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors. The server code is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Documentation files use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.