Foreign JIRA keys in Bitbucket are leading to nowhere - of course.

Question

Hello,

At the moment we have a Application Link between Bitbucket Server (v4.11.2) and JIRA Core & Software (v7.2.6) actively running. This is working really great, we really like the possibilities we are going to have with it.

Currently we are in the situation importing Git repositories, externally created and managed by a partner, to our Bitbucket Server. We regularly updating these repositories by pulling the full history. This partner is using JIRA as well. It's the partners own JIRA instance and it is fully independent from ours, so there is not shared issue management or something like this. Sadly, there are JIRA keys in the partners commit messages and these are automatically recognized by our Bitbucket. Because these keys aren't existing, the links Bitbucket is creating are leading to nowhere. Even worse can be the scenario where the foreign keys coincidentally are matching with ours, but meaning different things. This can be very confusing and dangerous at the end.

I wonder how this can be handled? Is there a way ignoring certain JIRA projects in Bitbucket? Much better would be if Bitbucket (and the link creation to JIRA) could know what commits are done externally and ignoring these for the actual linking to JIRA.

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance,
Peter

Peter Nepp · Answer

Hi Christian,

thanks for your response. I was afraid that there won't be a solution. Sure, Bitbucket just storing repositories with commits, but wouldn't it theoretically possible comparing commit authors/committers by the internal user account list of the Bitbucket server and make the difference with the help of this and decide if it is an external commit or not? Sure, it might be a bit intense in calculation maybe. Just thinking out loud ... ;)

Thanks for the link, I'll give the RegEx solution a try.

I wonder if developer collaboratively working on projects with Bitbucket Cloud and JIRA Cloud across multiple instances might run into similar issues? Or do they share their JIRA usually?

Thanks,
Peter

Christian Glockner · Answer

Hi Peter,

I don't think there is a solution for this I'm afraid.

Bitbucket Server doesn't verify issue IDs for existence (as long as they follow the expected format) on its own. Bitbucket Server also has no concept of "external" vs "internal" commits - it stores repositories that contain commits.

I haven't tried it, but you may be able to exclude certain projects using a custom regex for issue key detection - we've got some documentation here.

Cheers,

Christian

Premier Support Engineer

Atlassian