You’re right, that it doesn’t just work as conveniently out-of-the-box on Codeberg. However you do not have to self-host: You merely have to apply to get access to their hosted Woodpecker instance at ci.codeberg.org.
Onboarding requires a few manual steps, as to prevent the abuse of Codeberg’s limited resources. You will need to request access by filling out this form. After submitting, a Codeberg volunteer will review your request and grant you access if your use case is appropriate.
I don’t know how Woodpecker works, but I have a lot of experience with Gitlab runners. You can startup a runner locally, as it doesn’t need to be publicly accessible from the internet. Only the Gitlab instance needs to be accessible for the runner, as the runner actively fetches new jobs from there and pushes the results again.
If Woodpecker works similarly, you could just deploy the runner locally while you’re actively developing and your computer is running anyway, if you don’t want to pay for a VPS.
You’re right, that it doesn’t just work as conveniently out-of-the-box on Codeberg. However you do not have to self-host: You merely have to apply to get access to their hosted Woodpecker instance at ci.codeberg.org.
See docs here if you want to try it out: https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/
Edit: added quote from docs
I don’t know how Woodpecker works, but I have a lot of experience with Gitlab runners. You can startup a runner locally, as it doesn’t need to be publicly accessible from the internet. Only the Gitlab instance needs to be accessible for the runner, as the runner actively fetches new jobs from there and pushes the results again.
If Woodpecker works similarly, you could just deploy the runner locally while you’re actively developing and your computer is running anyway, if you don’t want to pay for a VPS.