Bitbucket Cloud - User Management via API - Not possible!

[Morten Stensgaard]

Hi All.

Anyone knowing in details, why there is no longer any user management available on the Bitbucket Cloud API v. 2.0?

Atlassian not wanting to support it?

Technical/security reasons?

On the roadmap(hidden somewhere)?

Can see the complains around the missing functionality in several forum threads - but no actual useful comments or even responses from Atlassian.

As a company, we are about to scale out Bitbucket in our organization - but the lack of proper user management via API is just a showstopper.

We need an automated/self-service setup that can facilitate autonomous teams with creation and decom of both users and repoes .

We have no direct need for hosting our own Bitbucket instance, so if that is the only alternative for getting an API option, we might as well look towards other cloud PAAS enterprise solutions as Github, Gitlab or even Azure Devops.

Thanks in advance

[jarredc]

Hey Friends, 

Based on feedback from our users, we decided to not deprecate that groups management v1 API endpoint, instead making it GDPR compliant.

Cheers,

Jarred

[Stephen Sifers]

Hello Morten,

For Cloud products, there were major changes to the API mainly having to do with user management. This is mainly due to the impacts of GDPR and how users are managed, stored and accessed within the Atlassian products. There is an article which covers more of this in great detail, you may find that article at Migration guide for major changes to Bitbucket Cloud REST APIs to improve user privacy and Bitbucket Cloud REST APIs are changing to improve user privacy.

You may find the developer roadmap at Atlassian platform for developers roadmap. This will include work being done to the API.

I hope this helps to clarify how the user management has been changed and where it is heading in the near future.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers

[Morten Stensgaard]

Hi Stephen.

Thanks for answering

I'm fully aware of the recent GDPR changes and what impact it will have/had on the APIs.

But as an Atlassian admin, I should be able to fully control my users - I onboarded them to start with :-)

Not even on the UI, do I have any information relevant for actual user identification - I can't even see their emailaddress!? - So unless I personally know them, I can't even contact them and then i'm basically navigating in the blind.

The only thing I have is an Bitbucket userid + potential user profile picture!?

This is impossible to use and manage on a longer term in an Enterprise company, with +50 developers

Although I can extract a list of Bitbucket team users on the API, this again does not give me anything useful except for a username/DisplayName(Specified by user themselves) and an Account_ID.

I have no simple way of mapping this to our AD users

And if I even did this manually, I would still not have any option for automatically manage permissions and access.

I am not able to see any records on the Trello board, that mentions proper/automated user management via API.

On that basis I must conclude that Atlassian Cloud products does not support User management through their APIs and do not have it on their roadmap - We have decided within our company, that we want central user/access management on a product like this.

That leaves us as a company with 2 options:

Atlassian Access, which is quite an expensive product with very limited functionality when it comes to centralized user/access management and automations.

or

Move to different platforms - Like Bitbucket Server/Datacenter(on-prem), Gitlab, Github, Azure devops (Which all support this functionality on their APIs)

Only concern about a potential migration to Bitbucket Server/datacenter is that this functionality is only available in the older API v 1.0 - I would assume, that even the On-prem solutions would have deprecated APIs in the future releases - so developing an integration based on an older API version might break or cause a version lock on our side.

Is there by any chance a possiblity for getting an offical answer from the Atlassian API development group on what ideas/plans they are having on this specific subject - 

With the recent changes to the API(due to GDPR), the Atlassian Cloud product suite is moving even further away from proper user management in an enterprise context.

[jarredc]

Hey Morten,

I'm a product manager on Bitbucket. I'm sorry this has gone without further response. Could you follow up with me on email? Would love to talk to you about it.

jcolli2@atlassian.com

Jarred