Yeah the docs are lacking. The way Woodpecker works is, there is a Server, that is sort of the "manager"; you only run one of these. You run one Agent on each host that you want builds to happen on. The Agent then executes the steps of your Pipeline on a "platform", which is an Agent running on a particular OS.

By default an Agent just wants to execute jobs in a Docker container, using the docker backend. But there are multiple backends. To run a build on Windows/MacOS, you would download the Go binary for the Agent for that platform, and execute it with the right environment variables to specify the local backend.

I think a lot of this functionality is just now getting added to Woodpecker so it's not been documented. It's been in Drone for a long time, but the fork is from a while ago.

https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/setup https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/agent-config https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/usage/pipeline-syntax#platfor... https://github.com/woodpecker-ci/woodpecker/tree/master/pipe...