Drone
Drone is a self-service continuous integration and delivery platform that lets development teams automate build, test, and deployment pipelines. Pipelines are defined as simple YAML files committed to the repository, and each step runs inside an isolated Docker container, making builds self-contained and portable. Drone was acquired by Harness in 2020 but remains committed to open source.
Key Features
- Pipeline as code — declare workflows in a
.drone.ymlfile stored with your source code. - Containerised steps — every step runs in a lightweight Docker container pulled on demand.
- Powerful configuration — steps, services, secrets, volumes, triggers, and approvals declared declaratively.
- Forge integration — works with GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Bitbucket, and other Git providers.
- Plugin ecosystem — a large marketplace of reusable Drone plugins for common tasks.
- Live build logs — stream build output in real time to the browser.
- Multiple runners — run builds with the Docker runner, the Kubernetes runner, or the executor runner.
- Security-first — secrets are masked in logs and scoped to the pipelines that need them.
Why Use Drone?
Drone keeps CI/CD configuration where it belongs — in your repository — and executes it in isolated containers for clean, repeatable builds. It is fast to set up and lightweight to run on your own infrastructure, and teams have reported moving from heavier CI systems to Drone for high-volume deployment workloads.
Use Cases
- Automated build, test, and delivery for Git-based development teams.
- Self-hosted continuous integration with containerised, reproducible build steps.
- Deployment orchestration with triggers and manual approval gates.
- Teams that want a lightweight but powerful alternative to hosted CI services.
Platform
Self-hosted (Go) · Linux · Docker / Kubernetes
Licence
Apache-2.0