Skip to content

Getting started

Crow CI is a Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)1 application. It is designed to be lightweight, simple to use and fast.

Why self-host CI/CD?

There are many CI/CD options offered for free. As with all hosted options which are provided for free, there are limitations and downsides. Self-hosting provides ways to get rid of these.

For CI/CD specifically, the following limitations of public CI offerings can be tackled:

  • Limited build times
  • Low-performing runners
  • Storing secrets on remote platforms
  • Platform/Forge bound

Why use Crow CI in the first place?

Crow CI gives you full control over the selection of nodes which will process builds. You can store secrets on servers you own and run as many builds as you want. In addition, Crow CI works with many different forges (GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Forgejo, Bitbucket), allowing you to transition between these or use a consistent CI syntax across all of them.

Combined with the Crow CI Autoscaler, you can make use of powerful CI runners on any cloud provider, giving you the full power the cloud space has to offer while keeping costs to a minimum.

Containers at the core

Crow CI is a container-only application. This stands in contrast to other common CI/CD apps like GitHub Actions, GitLab Runner, Jenkins, Circle CI or Drone CI. While these can also execute pipelines in containers if desired, they are "host-first", i.e., by default pipelines run directly on a VM and are subsequently restricted to the OS on that VM.

Crow in contrast only uses containers and is hence operating-system agnostic, i.e. it does not matter which OS is running on the host which is executing the pipelines.

With respect to well-known CI/CD providers, Crow is mostly comparable to Circle CI, which is also making use of a container-only approach.

Target audience

Crow CI is Apache-2.0 licensed, lightweight and can be used in private environments without restriction. It has a very small footprint (< 200 MB memory consumption) in idle and can even be installed and practically used on a Raspberry Pi with 4GB (or even less, depending on what the builds will do).

Crow uses a SQLite by default and can do a lot with in during runtime. If you are planning a bigger instance with multiple (active) users and > 20 active repos, it is recommended to configure it with a Postgres or MariaDB database for performance reasons.2

History

Crow has been forked from Woodpecker CI (v3.0.0) in January 2025 from the former Woodpecker maintainer @pat-s. Motivation for the fork was built around the improvement of infrastructure-related processes (releases, docs, governance) and professionalizing the project ecosystem.

Woodpecker itself is a fork of Drone CI (v0.8.91) from April 2019 with the first standalone version being released on September 9th 2019.

Crow vs. Woodpecker

Note

This list is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to devalue Woodpecker. In fact, Crow welcomes any improvements that are ported to Woodpecker and aims for a harmonious collaboration

As of 2025-06, the following unique features exist in Crow:

  • Log retention: Each repository can define its own retention policy. A global default of 90 days is used
  • Descriptive error message: Errors are transparently parsed back to the user in the UI. Almost no "An unknown error occurred" messages are shown
  • Multi-org agents: Admins can deploy agents which are allowed to process builds from multiple organizations/users
  • Agent list: All instance agents are listed in the UI, also for non-admin users.
  • New pull_request_edited event trigger
  • Early fail when "manual" event triggers are not allowed in the repo: Instead of silently returning nothing, Crow shows a descriptive error message to the user
  • The agent ID a specific workflow was processed by is shown in the top panel of the log view
  • Custom agent labels are shown in the agent list
  • Added CI_COMMIT_PULL_REQUEST_TITLE env var
  • Manual pipeline runs show possible extra variables that have been passed during the UI
  • Log view: Top/Down buttons to jump to the top or bottom of the log view
  • Agents display their remaining workflow capacity in the agent list
  • Added support for multiple match types when specifying CROW_PLUGINS_PRIVILEGED: semver, semver-range, match and regex
  • Ability to cancel single workflows in matrix workflows
  • Improved mobile layout view (spacing, alignment)
  • Ability to fold the workflow panel and have a full-width log view

Additionally, for the Crow Autoscaler:

  • Ability to account for static agents: only deploy new (autoscaled) agents if static agents cannot process the queued builds

License

Crow CI is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license (following inheritance from Woodpecker and Drone).

The logo was designed and kindly contributed by Bold Crow AI.

  1. This RedHat blog post explains the concept of CI/CD in more detail. ↩

  2. This is primarily because Crow (still) stores pipeline logs in the DB. A refactoring to storing these outside the DB by default is planned but not yet implemented. ↩