What is woodpecker-ci-mcp?

An MCP server for Woodpecker CI, the lightweight, container-native CI engine that grew out of Drone. Woodpecker runs your pipelines; this server puts what they did — and the ability to do something about it — inside an MCP client.

It speaks the Woodpecker API and was written against, and verified on, a 3.18.0 instance.

Why

Because the interesting question is never "did it go red". You can see that on the dashboard. The interesting question is the next one: which step failed, what did it print, was it the same last night, and can we just run it again. Answering that means the pipeline list, then one pipeline's steps, then that step's log — three lookups a model chains in one turn and a person does by clicking, in a UI, in another tab.

The second reason is that reading is only half of it. Every other Woodpecker MCP server stops at the read tools, and the moment you know what broke you are back in the web UI anyway: to restart the pipeline, to approve the one waiting on a human, to fix the cron that fires an hour off, to rotate the secret a step just printed into a log. Those are the tools this server has, behind confirmation tokens where they cannot be undone.

What it looks like

> Why did the last pipeline on development fail?

  list_pipelines(repo_id: 21, branch: "development", status: "failure")
  get_pipeline(repo_id: 21, number: 1014)
  get_step_logs(repo_id: 21, number: 1014, step_id: 84190)

  Step "test" exited 1. The last lines are a failing assertion in
  UserServiceTest — a NullPointerException at UserService.java:212.
  The step before it, "build", succeeded.

> Restart it.

  restart_pipeline(repo_id: 21, number: 1014)
  Restarted as pipeline 1016.

What it will not do

The tool surface stops short in four places, all deliberate:

• It cannot read out or rotate its own access token. POST /user/token and DELETE /user/token exist in the API and are not tools here.
• It cannot forge a webhook. POST /hook would let a model start a pipeline while making it look as though somebody pushed a commit. trigger_pipeline is the honest version and is marked as a manual event.
• It does not hand over agent tokens on read, because the API does — see security.
• It does not stream. Server-sent events do not fit a request/response tool, so there is nothing to subscribe to; poll get_pipeline.

Where next

• Getting started — a token and three lines of config.
• Connecting clients — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Docker, mcp-hub.
• Configuration — and how to cut 71 tools down to the ones you want.
• Tools reference — every tool and its parameters.