woodpecker-ci/woodpecker

What it is

Woodpecker is a CI/CD engine, forked from Drone, that connects to a Git repository and runs pipelines on events such as pushes. It is written in Go, self-hosted, and designed around a small server plus agents, with plugins as the extension mechanism. It is Apache-2.0 licensed; documentation content under docs/ is CC BY-SA 4.0 README.

The project is used as the main CI/CD engine at Codeberg, according to its README README. Teams that want to keep both source and build infrastructure on their own hardware are the natural audience.

Quick start

The repository points to a dedicated installation guide rather than inline commands installation instructions. Follow that guide to deploy a server and at least one agent, connect your Git forge, and enable a repository. A pipeline is then committed as a workflow file in the repository.

The README does not include a complete command sequence, so no specific CLI example is reproduced here. The server runs with SQLite by default; no separate database is required for a first deployment README.

Runtime requirements

At idle, the server needs roughly 100 MB of RAM and an agent about 30 MB README. Any serious build load will require more. You need a server and agent deployment; the installation guide covers supported deployment options. Plugins are separate components, so pipeline capabilities depend on which plugins you enable.

Where to read more

• Official documentation
• Plugin overview
• Latest release
• Community chat

HotRepo's take

On 8 November 2026, Woodpecker recorded 6 new stars in the daily Go leaderboard, where it ranked 8th snapshot. This is a single snapshot and does not establish a trend. The project has a long Hacker News presence: a 2022 thread about the v0.15.0 release, with a comment thanking the team for an open-source CI that is not a nightmare to deploy HN comment, plus later posts about the v3.0.0 release and general mentions v3.0.0 thread. The conversation volume is small, but the repeated releases and its use at Codeberg suggest sustained maintenance rather than a short spike.