Bitbucket Cloud and Visual Studio: "Operation is forbidden" again

Ray Depew

I'm getting the "Operation is forbidden" error when trying to login to Bitbucket from Visual Studio.

I'm using Visual Studio 2017, and the Bitbucket Extension.

I just started using Visual Studio -- I've been using VS Code, bash, and PowerShell until now. I haven't had any problem logging in on the website, pushing/pulling/fetching from the command line, and accessing repos via REST API. 

I've tried the following login combinations:

* username / regular password

* email address / regular password

* username / perfectly good app password

* username / new app password

My Atlassian account was created in November or December 2020, so it's ahead of the 15 Sep 2021 deadline, but I tried app passwords anyway, just in case that made a difference.

As a workaround, I have cloned a repo from the command line and opened the solution in Visual Studio. That doesn't fix the login problem, though. Got any ideas?

Ray Depew

Two fixes:

1. The preferred way: switch to VS 2019. Or maybe VS 2022. The Bitbucket capability is built into VS 2019, and you don't need the extension anymore. Everything works fine.

2. The less-preferred way. It works, but ... : Use a "god mode" app password. For the  app password I was unsuccessfully trying to use, I had it set to R/W repos, and nothing more. So I created a new app password, with all permissions enabled -- set to do everything to everything -- like logging in as root. It worked.

I cannot find documentation on which permissions are required for the VS 2017 / BB Cloud interaction, but "god mode" works, and so I'll stick with it until we migrate to a newer edition of VS.