pipeline not working on pull-requests

Question

I am trying to trigger bitbucket pipelines on every pull request to staging and production branches. But it wouldn't trigger.

I have tried passing branches values like staging/*, master/* and even '**', but the pipelines wouldn't just trigger

Following is my config:

Theodora Boudale · Answer

Hi @sumandhakal and welcome to the community!

Pull requests pipelines cannot be triggered based on the destination branch at the moment. The branch you specify in your bitbucket-pipelines.yml for a pull-requests pipeline matches the source branch of the PR. We have a feature request for pull-requests pipelines based on the destination branch that you can vote for and add yourself as a watcher:

* https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-17859

In the meantime, you could use a pull-requests build based on the source branch, and then, during the build, you can check the destination branch of the PR using the default variable $BITBUCKET_PR_DESTINATION_BRANCH, and execute different commands/scripts depending on the destination branch.

Apart from that, there are also some syntax errors in your bitbucket-pipelines.yml that need to be fixed:

1. One of them is what Luke mentioned. The branch names under pull-requests should be properties, not a list, so you need to remove the hyphen before the branch names.

2. The properties name and deployment are properties of a step or a stage, not of a pipeline, so they should be defined for a step or a stage. If you want to use the same deployment environment for multiple steps of the same pipeline, the way to do this is with a stage, like in the following example:

pipelines:
  pull-requests:
    testing1:
      - stage:
          name: Deploy to staging
          deployment: staging
          steps:
            - step: 
                <<: *step1
            - step: 
                <<: *step2

3. The keyword steps inside a pipeline can only be used with a stage, like in the example I shared above. If you don't use a stage, you can simply list the steps without the steps: part. However, if you want to use the same deployment environment for both steps in the pipeline, then a stage with the steps: is the way to go.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

Kind regards,
Theodora

Luke James · Answer

Your syntax seems to be incorrect, branch names need to be child properties rather than a list.

See https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/pipeline-start-conditions/#Pull-Requests