Woodpecker CI Has a Free CI/CD Server — Lightweight Drone Fork for Self-Hosting

#cicd #devops #docker #opensource

Woodpecker CI is a community fork of Drone CI — lightweight, container-native CI/CD.

What You Get for Free

Container-native — every step runs in a Docker container
YAML pipelines — simple, familiar configuration
Multi-platform — Linux, macOS, Windows, ARM
Git integration — Gitea, GitHub, GitLab, Forgejo, Bitbucket
Secrets management — encrypted secrets per repo/org
Matrix builds — test across multiple versions
Plugins — 100+ community plugins
Cron jobs — scheduled pipelines
Self-hosted — free, unlimited pipelines, unlimited users

Quick Start

# Docker Compose
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 \
  -v woodpecker-data:/var/lib/woodpecker \
  -e WOODPECKER_OPEN=true \
  -e WOODPECKER_GITEA=true \
  -e WOODPECKER_GITEA_URL=https://git.example.com \
  woodpeckerci/woodpecker-server:latest

# .woodpecker.yaml
steps:
  - name: test
    image: node:20
    commands:
      - npm install
      - npm test
  - name: build
    image: node:20
    commands:
      - npm run build

Why Developers Choose It

GitHub Actions is free but cloud-only. Jenkins is bloated:

Lightweight — server + agent use ~50MB RAM total
Container-native — clean environments every build
Simple YAML — no Jenkinsfile complexity
Gitea-native — perfect companion for self-hosted Git

A small team was running Jenkins on a 4GB RAM server that kept crashing. They switched to Woodpecker CI — same pipelines run on 512MB RAM, container isolation prevents build pollution, and YAML config replaced 200-line Jenkinsfiles.