How to revive expired branches in Bamboo?

[Sven Paulus]

We're currently using Bamboo 5.10 for automatic building processes. In one plan we enabled branch detection to build different branches automatically (multiple release and feature branches), which is a really awesome feature.

Before we realized that we should switch the "Inactive branches" dropdown to "Do not delete inactive branches" one branch got recognized by Bamboo but then removed a few days later due to inactivity. However this an important branch where a release is created every few weeks, so we need it back in the game.

I tried to switch manually to this branch in the "Repositories" tab, which worked to build the branch, but when switching back the repository configuration to the "master" branch, the build on the special branch got recorded as "master" build and the special branch is still not in the list of branches. So this trick couldn't be used to re-add the branch.

When changing the branch name in the "Repositories" tab, Bamboo displayed a warning message "This change could invalidate existing branches repository configuration. Please fix them manually."  What does that mean? How do I fix the branch configuration manually?

Yes, I'd really like to manipulate the list of branches manually (to re-add the special release branch), but I haven't seen a place where the list of branches known (or formerly known) to a Bamboo plan is exposed to be edited.

So, what's the best way to resolve this problem? The only way that I can currently think of is to clone the plan and start over, this time making sure "Do no delete inactive branches" is always enabled. But this seems to be extremely inelegant ... 

[Tim Crall · Accepted solution]

You should be able to go to Actions->Configure Plan and then click on the Branches tab.  It should show the currently existing branches on the left.

You can add a new branch with the "Create plan branch" button in the top-right.  It will show you a list of branches on your source repo that don't exist as plan branches or allow you to create a branch manually.  

You can also delete branches by clicking on them in the sidebar (which takes you to the "Branch details" screen) and then clicking Actions->Delete branch.

[Sven Paulus]

Ah - great, thank you 

I hadn't noticed the "Create plan branch" button - that worked fine. This was exactly what I was looking for.

Yay, problem solved!

[Scott Randall]

Is it possible to get Bamboo to automatically (re)create build plans for branches that have expired? We are experiencing difficulties where we go back to (not very) old feature branches that have expired (over 7 days) but Bamboo does not run builds for new commits. What can I do?