Built a Forge app that reports on your Bitbucket repo graveyard — and lets you archive them properly
Most Bitbucket Cloud workspaces have a graveyard problem. Projects end, prototypes get abandoned, forks get forked — and the repos just stay there. Nobody deletes them because nobody’s sure if anything still depends on them. A few years in, you’ve got 200 repositories and no idea which 40 are actually alive.
I built Repo Archiver to solve this in two steps: first, show you exactly which repos are stale; second, let you archive them properly — without deleting anything.
How it works: it’s actually two Forge apps working together (more on why below).
The Jira app connects to your Bitbucket account via OAuth and generates a report across all your workspaces, classifying every repository as Active, Stale (no commits or PR activity in 90+ days), or Archived. You get a clear picture of workspace health without leaving Jira.
The Bitbucket companion app does the actual archiving: it moves a repo into a dedicated “📦 Archived” project, blocks new pull request merges into it, and shows a clear archived notice on the repo’s Source page, so anyone who lands there knows immediately it’s retired. Nothing is deleted — code, history, and issues are all preserved, and you can unarchive with one click.
Why two apps? Atlassian doesn’t currently support publishing Bitbucket-only Forge apps to the Marketplace (ECO-198 ). So the archiving app is distributed as a companion app via a direct install link surfaced inside the Jira app, which is the Marketplace product.
This is a paid Forge app — disclosure, I’m the developer.
Would love feedback from anyone managing a large or long-lived Bitbucket workspace: does the 90-day staleness window match how your teams actually think about “dead” repos? Anything about workspace cleanup this doesn’t cover?
Repo Archiver for Bitbucket Cloud
