10 of the newest features to level up your Bitbucket Data Center experience

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Hi there, Bitbucket community! I'm Sarah, a Bitbucket Data Center product manager here at Atlassian, and I’m excited to share with you some of the great features we’ve been working on.

Bitbucket Data Center has had a big few months. As well as continuing to invest in enterprise grade performance and security, we’ve been hard at work on some features that improve the developer experience and help teams manage administration at scale. In this post, I’ll share 10 of the highly requested features we’ve shipped since July and give you a taste of a few more we have lined up for you that are coming soon.

Developer Experience Wins

Firstly, we’ve really been focused on trying to help our community of developers be as productive as you can be. We’ve been exploring ways to:

• reduce manual tasks

• cut out wait times in your team workflow

• help you to collaborate seamlessly with your teams

Check out these 5 recent features that are already reshaping the way our own teams work!

1. Cut out wait time by auto-merging your pull requests

We are delighted to bring you a feature that automates and streamlines the merging of pull requests. You no longer need to manually check if a pull request is ready for merge or constantly monitor builds and approvals. Bitbucket Data Center can now handle merging automatically once all criteria are met, making it a set-and-forget experience. This feature is already saving Atlassian teams significant time on a daily basis while still allowing manual merges when needed - we hope it is a game-changer for you too!

Learn more about auto-merge

2. Streamline your review by adding Code Owners

Experience smooth and efficient pull request creation with Code Owners in Bitbucket Data Center. By adding rules to a CODEOWNERS file, developers can define who needs to review specific files or parts of the repository.

When a new pull request is created, Bitbucket Data Center automatically suggests the most relevant reviewers based on this information. This ensures that the right reviewers, with the best understanding of the code, are included from the start. No more time-wasting searches through chat channels or commit histories for relevant reviewers. Code owners streamlines pull request creation and leads to higher-quality code reviews.

Learn more about code owners

3. Enrich your collaboration with embedded videos

A picture is worth a thousand words. Now, you can tell that story without your viewers breaking their work context by having to download and view videos in a separate app. With our new built-in video player, users can just hit Play and watch videos directly in their browser without leaving Bitbucket Data Center.

For even more video action, we have also introduced the ability to embed videos from platforms like Loom, YouTube, and Vimeo. Users simply need to paste a video link into a pull request description or comment, and it will be automatically transformed into an embedded video player.

Find streaming videos in Bitbucket Data Center Release 8.13 and more on embedded videos in Bitbucket Data Center Release 8.15

4. Automate pull request commit messages with templates

Instead of asking developers to add extra details to pull request commit messages, organisations can now set a tailored message template to satisfy their requirements and the details will be automatically populated for you in the merge dialog. Commit message templates also support variables, allowing your commit messages to include details such as the source and target branch, the list of approvers, and more. This helps ensure consistent, informative commit messages without wasting time copying and pasting the required details for each pull request. 

Learn more about custom commit message templates

5. Cut to the chase by searching by projects

In large organisations finding a project among thousands of others can be hard. You don’t need to scroll through an endless alphabetical list of projects anymore. Our new search field makes finding the right project easy.

Find project search in Bitbucket Data Center Release 8.13

Raising the bar on admin tools

We haven’t forgotten the admins who have to deal with critical requirements from security and ensure the integrity of your codebase. To improve admins' experience, we’ve been focused on:

• enhanced code security
• getting the most out of your licence

Take a look at these 5 features that give you new powerful tools for maintaining confidence in your repositories.

6. Commit signatures at a glance

This new feature enables you to effortlessly validate the integrity of repositories by providing a convenient way to check which commits have verified signatures. A tick icon tells you that a commit has a verified signature and a warning icon alerts you to an unverified signature. Now you can easily identify and authenticate each commit, ensuring trust and security in your codebase.

 

Learn more about visible commit signatures

7. Security keys for SSH

Security Key Support for Git over SSH enhances project security by allowing the use of security keys like YubiKey. These keys offer robust protection against phishing and store data securely within the key itself. With this feature, Bitbucket Data Center now supports ECDSA-SK and ED25519-SK keys for Git over SSH, providing an unprecedented level of security for your secrets.

Learn more about how to create the new security keys

8. Sign with X.509 (S/MIME) certificates

X.509 certificates are another new secure alternative for signing commits and tags in Bitbucket Data Center. Developers can now be sure that their code is following the organisation’s security and compliance policy. Administrators have control over who pushes code changes through the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and can prevent situations where developers may use self-signed keys to sign their code.

 

Learn more about X.509 certificates in Bitbucket

9. Use AWS Secrets Manager to manage Bitbucket configuration

Bitbucket Data Center now supports AWS Secrets Manager as an additional encryption method for protecting values in the bitbucket.properties file. This ensures that plaintext values are not stored in product configuration files and provides added security against credentials leakage.

Learn more about how to use AWS Secrets Manager in Bitbucket

10. Filtering by licensed users

In organisations with a large user base, tracking user activity can be a daunting task. Our new feature gives admins a powerful tool, identifying licensed users in the global list of users in Bitbucket Data Center administration. This enables you to identify inactive licensed users and optimise licensed seats.

1. the Licensed column
2. the filters for the license status, last authentication time, and directory
3. the Export menu with the new option Users 

Find out more in Bitbucket Data Center Release 8.12

What we’re building now

All of these features, with many more, will be in our upcoming Long-Term Support (LTS) release. Visit the Bitbucket Data Center LTS announcement.

But if all of this isn't exciting enough, let me give you a sneak peek of what we're currently working on. We’ve been listening to your feedback and are busy building some of the things you have requested. Here are 3 more exciting features that we’re working on over the coming months.

• Dark theme: One of our most requested features is nearly here! With dark theme, you will be able to enjoy a sleek, modern look that reduces eye strain and enhances the readability of text, images and code. Get ready to discover a whole new visual experience with the dark theme for Bitbucket Data Center.
• Draft pull requests: This long-awaited feature is finally coming to Bitbucket Data Center. You will be able to create pull requests that are clearly marked as draft, allowing you to get the right feedback from reviewers at the right time and preventing premature merging.
• Multi-line comments: Improve communication between teammates by adding comments, tasks, and code suggestions to specific line ranges.

For the latest updates on these features and more, check out the Data Center roadmap.

As always, your feedback helps us shape Bitbucket Data Center to be what you want it to be. So please comment below or submit something to our Jira project if you have questions or suggestions.