Allowing client to download a branch of private repository

Jatin Soni

I am a solo developer, and my most use cases for BitBucket and Jira are to provide development updates and support for the software I build. 

To make production sources available to my client 24x7, I would like to give my client access to the repo's particular branch without adding them as a user. 

Is there any way to give my client access to the branch to download the source and report issues?

Theodora Boudale

Hi @Jatin Soni ,

I'm afraid that it is not possible to grant access to someone to a specific branch of a repo only.

It is possible to give someone read access to a repo without adding them as a user with the use of Access keys: the user can generate an SSH key pair and give you their public key which you can then add to this specific repo's Access keys. However, they'll still be able to clone the whole repo, and not a specific branch.

The only thing I can think of as a workaround would be to create a separate repo with this branch only, and either grant access to the user to this new repo or set up Access keys for the new repo and this user. In this case, you would need to manually keep it up-to-date with the main repo you're working on, i.e. push any new commits to this new repo as well.

Kind regards,
Theodora