Woodpecker CI

Woodpecker CI is a community-driven open-source continuous integration and continuous deployment engine built with simplicity, extensibility, and freedom in mind. Originally forked from Drone CI in 2019, it has grown into an independent project with over 4,500 GitHub stars and an active contributor community. The platform executes pipeline steps inside Docker containers, ensuring reproducible and isolated build environments. Configuration is managed through YAML files stored in version control, treating pipelines as code with full traceability and reviewability. Unlike many CI/CD tools that impose vendor lock-in, this project is and always will be completely free under the Apache 2.0 license, with no enterprise paywalls or feature restrictions. Multi-workflow support allows teams to define multiple interconnected pipelines within a single project, enabling complex dependency chains and conditional execution paths. The extensible plugin system lets developers create custom pipeline steps using any container image, with a growing ecosystem of community-contributed plugins. The platform integrates with GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Bitbucket, and Forgejo for source code management. Additional features include matrix builds, conditional step execution, service containers for integration testing, cron-triggered pipelines, and a clean web dashboard for monitoring build status. Self-hosted deployment works on Kubernetes, Docker, or bare metal. The project maintains an active Matrix chat community, Open Collective sponsorship program, and regular releases driven by community feedback.