Bitbucket - How to force users to cut branches only from master?

[Matt Cruger]

How can I force users to only cut branches from master in Bitbucket? We use a branching model that is very similar to gitflow, but we cut all of our feature branches from master instead of from the development branch. This is to prevent the problem of a feature branch being cut from development, and picking up changes which may later be reverted if we have to pull a feature out of a release. Example of this scenario... f1 is cut, worked on, and merged back to development. f2 is cut from development and worked on. f1 is reverted on development or a release branch because an issue is found during testing that prevents the change from going. f2 is merged back to develop, and the changes from f1 which were reverted come through with the merge as well. 

Any way to lock down branch creation to happen only from master? Admins will still need to be able to cut branches from wherever necessary for one off things.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

There is no way to lock it down now. You can make 'master' the default branch and that will prevent choosing development by mistake but users will always be able to select development and proceed.

Even if you implement something on the remote, users will still be able to do it locally and then push the branches!