First of all, I actually do prefer Forgejo Actions over Woodpecker. Once set up, my only problem with it (so far) is almost certainly caused by my infrastructure and isn't inherent to FA itself. Pecker, on the other hand, is quite a bit easier to set up and better documented, but I had that issue where it would disconnect from Forgejo and need a few buttons pressed to fix.

This one is just FA being weird:

If you want to deploy the Runner using Docker, the documentation is poor at best. From both a security and documentation standpoint, having it in its own VM is better, but you can do Docker. You just have to read and figure out more on your own. Reading through the example deployments from the documentation will eventually lead you to something along the lines of this (which I copy-pasted from my deployment rather than search for again):

forgejo-runner:
  image: code.forgejo.org/forgejo/runner:6.3.1
  restart: always
  user: 1000:1000
  environment:
    - DOCKER_HOST=tcp://dind:2376
  volumes:
    - runner_cache:/data
  depends_on:
    - dind
  command: >-
    bash -ec '
    forgejo-runner create-runner-file --name runner --instance https://${DOMAIN} --secret ${RUNNER_SECRET};
    sed -i -e "s|\"labels\": null|\"labels\": [\"docker:docker://docker.io/node:22-bookworm\", \"ubuntu-latest:docker://ghcr.io/catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest\"]|" .runner ;
    forgejo-runner generate-config > config.yml;
    sed -i -e "s|^  network: \"\"$|  network: host|" config.yml ;
    sed -i -e "s|^  envs:$$|  envs:\n    DOCKER_HOST: tcp://dind:2376\n    CONTAINER_HOST: tcp://dind:2376|" config.yml ;
    forgejo-runner --config config.yml daemon
    '

You don't actually need to do this since you could edit the two config files yourself and bind them to the container. This is just how you automatically generate those files... And it's dumb, but it works and it means you don't have to keep track of those files.

This one is probably just my infrastructure: https://lemmy.world/comment/16093731

If you do go for FA in Docker (or Podman) and need some help, just ask. I'll post more of my compose and explain my decisions.