I hate woodpeckers, but I really like this CI/CD tool.

So occasionally I stumble across interesting tools that somehow don't come up as a part of my normal tool research but instead are buried deep in the comments of one of the long format forums I prefer. WoodPecker CI is one of these tools. I had never encountered it despite looking repeatedly at all the simple CI/CD tools I could find. And my initial take on this tool is it has a very nice sweet spot as a standalone CI/CD tool you can hook up to an existing code repository. Here's a quick take on the features:

  • Apache 2.0 Licensed
  • Written in Go-lang
  • Docker-compose, Helm chart, or binary installation
  • Sqlite by default, but supports MySQL and Postgres
  • Prometheus endpoint built in
  • YAML pipeline and step definition
  • Conditional step execution
  • Matrix builds
  • Docker based build agents

I'm really not sure why WoodPecker CI didn't show up in my recent research on continuous integration tools, but I hope posting a bit about it helps that situation. I will definitely be trying it out on some projects I have in need of a simple CI solution where the normal easy CI/CD buttons aren't available. Maybe I'll give a more in depth review of this CI tool after those efforts.

Repo: https://github.com/woodpecker-ci/woodpecker