Repo permissions vanishing when moving repo to different project

Esther Strom

Our users have recently wanted to reorganize their many repos, so have asked my team to create several new projects in Bitbucket. Several users have noticed that, once they've moved their repos, they no longer have access to them.

The vast majority of our repo access is done via access group, not individual access. Our projects are all set to Private, which has this text: "Private projects are only visible to your workspace and anyone who has direct access to a repository in the project"

I cannot believe that this implies that user groups will be removed from the repo when it's moved to the project; surely "private" just indicates that the repo is only available to people who have been given access to it, whether via group or individual, as opposed to the project and all its repos being open to non-workspace users.

Can someone clarify if this is true? We have hundreds of repos, and hundreds of users, and if we have to go through and add each user individually to each repo, it will take years.

Patrik S

Hello @Esther Strom ,

Thank you for reaching out to Atlassian Community!

From the behavior you have reported, it seems like you are being affected by a bug where all the users with direct access to the repository having it's project changed, are loosing the permissions to that repository. Also, all the User Groups on your workspace that are not configured to "Automatically assign permissions for new repositories" are also being removed from the repository permissions when the project is changed.

We are already aware of this issue, and a bug ticket was raised to our development team in order to fix it, which you can find in the following link :

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-21677

I would suggest you to add your vote there, since this helps both developers and product managers to understand the impact. Also, make sure you add yourself as a watcher in case you want to receive first-hand updates from that ticket. Please note that all bug fixes are implemented with this policy in mind: https://confluence.atlassian.com/support/atlassian-cloud-bug-fix-policy-206865884.html

I'm afraid that, for the repositories where you already have changed the project, you would have to re-add the access manually, by giving access to the respective groups on Repository Settings > Users and group Access > Add Members. The workaround at this moment, specifically for the user groups, would be for you to configure the Automatically assign permissions for new repositories option in every User Group that you do not want to have it's permissions removed when the repository project is changed.

From the example above using Administrators groups, when a repository that group has access is moved to another project, the group will continue to have Read access, as that permissions is configured to be automatically assigned.

Do let us know in case you have any further questions.

Thanks, @Esther Strom .

Kind regards,

Patrik S