- A server which is the heard of Woodpecker and ships the webinterface.
- Next to one server you can deploy any number of agents which will run the pipelines.
> Each agent is able to process one pipeline step by default.
>
> If you have 4 agents installed and connected to the Woodpecker server, your system will process 4 builds in parallel.
>
> You can add more agents to increase the number of parallel builds or set the agent's `WOODPECKER_MAX_PROCS=1` environment variable to increase the number of parallel builds for that agent.
Woodpecker needs to know its own address. You must therefore provide the public address of it in `<scheme>://<hostname>` format. Please omit trailing slashes:
The server and agents use a shared secret to authenticate communication. This should be a random string of your choosing and should be kept private. You can generate such string with `openssl rand -hex 32`:
Authentication is done using OAuth and is delegated to one of multiple version control providers, configured using environment variables. The example above demonstrates basic GitHub integration.
By default Woodpecker uses a sqlite database which requires zero installation or configuration. See the [database settings](/docs/administration/database) page to further configure it or use MySQL or Postgres.