Tried to switch two workspace IDs and now both IDs seem "taken"

Question

I have a workspace on my work account and one on my personal account, and I want to switch their IDs because they make more sense in each others' contexts rather than their own. So I tried to change `workspaceX` into `workspaceX2`, which worked fine, and then tried to change `workspaceY` into `workspaceX`, but I got an error page:

I made the changes yesterday, but I still get the error message. Are workspace IDs taken forever once used? Or does it take a couple of days for the change to properly propagate through the system and release the old ID?

Thanks in advance for any help/insight on this.

Patrik S · Answer

Hello Adrian,

Only the personal workspace can have its ID matching the corresponding username.

So you will first need to change the username under Personal settings, and then you can access the personal workspace and change the workspaceID to the same ID as the new username.

Changing your username will affect your authentication in git commands/API requests in case you are using Basic Auth (username and app password).

WorkspaceID changes will impact the URLs of all repositories, snippets, wikis, and static websites hosted on this Bitbucket account.

The instructions on how to update your local repositories with the new URL are outlined in Update the URL in your configuration file.

Thank you, Adrian!

Patrik S

Adrian Wiik · Answer

Haha, you're right on the money. I can also see now that my usernames are also switched (which is probably the reason I am facing these issues in the first place). Is it possible to switch the usernames, and then rename the workspaces to match the switched usernames? That would solve everything. Also, are there any side effects to changing a username? I do not want to mess up my work account over this silly thing.

Patrik S · Answer

Hello @Adrian Wiik ,

Thank you for reaching out to the community!

When creating a workspace and providing the desired name, we check for any existing workspaceID or username with the same ID, and if it does exist, you will not be able to use that ID, as they need to be globally unique.

So I think what might be happening if you are renaming a personal workspace,(see Difference between shared and personal workspaces ) is that you have changed the workspaceID from workspaceX to workspaceX2, but your account's username still being workspaceX , which would prevent the creation of a workspace with that name.

In this case, could you please confirm if any of your accounts are using the same username as the desired workspace ID?

You can check the account's username by going to your avatar in the top right corner, and accessing Personal Settings.

If confirmed that a username is already using that desired ID, you can change the username to a different one and then you should be able to create a new workspace with that ID.

Let me know in case you have any questions.

Thank you, @Adrian Wiik

Patrik S