Drone
A container-native continuous delivery system.
Drone runs each pipeline step in its own Docker container, which makes pipelines highly reproducible and isolated: dependencies live inside images rather than baked into long-lived agents. Pipelines are defined as a small YAML document committed alongside the source code, with steps, services, and triggers expressed declaratively.
Brad Rydzewski started Drone in 2014. The project was open- sourced under Apache-2.0, then acquired by Harness in 2020 along with Brad himself. In 2022 Drone's licence shifted to the Polyform Small Business model, which restricts commercial use above a revenue threshold. The community fork "Woodpecker CI" continues the original Apache-2.0 direction and has gained a following for self-hosters who prefer to stay on a clearly open-source licence.
Drone was popular among teams who wanted GitLab-CI-style pipelines without running GitLab itself, and remains in use at many small-to-medium organisations. Newer container-native CI tools (Tekton, GitHub Actions self-hosted, Gitea Actions, Woodpecker) have taken some of the mindshare it had a few years ago.
License: Apache-2.0 (older) / Polyform-Small-Business (newer)
Category: CI/CD
Website: https://www.drone.io/
Install
Run as a container: docker run -d -e DRONE_*=... -p 80:80 drone/drone:latest
Authors
- Brad Rydzewski (creator)
- Harness