Bitbucket Cloud seperate merge vs push permissions

[James Fryer]

Is there any way in Bitbucket Cloud to only allow merge permission on the master branch? 

Basically what I am looking to do is make it possible for developers to submit and merge pull requests, but prevent any unintended pushes to master.

From this article: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/branch-management-385912271.html, as far as I can see I can lock down a branch write access entirely however it doesn't seem to have the granularity to allow merge but not push. From what I can work out I can effectively disable write permissions by using the "Limit Pushes to specific users and groups" and assigning it to an empty group, but this means that no one can merge pull requests.

However this article (for Bitbucket Server): https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/using-branch-permissions-776639807.html, seems to have the functionality I wanted, but I would prefer to use the cloud version of Bitbucket.

[Mike Friedrich]

You could use a plug in to do an auto merge based on some rules using a "service account".

[evzijst]

Yes, a Connect Add-On could potentially automate the gate keeper workflow.

[evzijst]

You are correct. Bitbucket Cloud's branch restrictions regulate write access and are blind to PR merge vs push.

We might add this distinction in the future when pull requests get merge checks, similar to Server, but for now there is no way to force the use of pull requests, unless you restrict master to all but a single "gate keeper" developer who performs all merges.