Is there a way to determine who changed branch permissions and when it happened?

[JimBurnell]

Today we had a situation where the master and develop branches in our repository suddenly had "prevent re-writing of history" and "prevent deleting branches" restrictions put on them.

There are a total of 5 people who have administrator access to the repository, and all of us say we didn't do it.

Is there any log we could consult to see how, when, and by whom this permission change occurred?

Thanks!

Jim

[JimBurnell · Accepted solution]

Actually, just found the Audit Log, which gave us our answer. I'd delete the question if I could.

[Julius Davies _bit-booster_com_]

I think you should keep this Q and A.  They are on point and useful for others!

 p.s.  "Prevent Rewrite" and "Prevent Deletion" are good controls to have in place for 'master' and 'develop'.   I do recommend them.

[JimBurnell]

What does "prevent rewrite" do, exactly? I assumed it would block someone from, for example, merging a feature branch with stale develop code back into develop unless develop was merged into it first. But we got in some weird state where any push to develop was blocked.

[Julius Davies _bit-booster_com_]

It prevents "git push --force" against the designated branch.  Another way of saying this:  fast-forward pushes only are allowed.  And yet another way (sorry, so many ways to describe this!): if 'master' is protected with "Prevent Rewrites" then any push to 'origin/master' must include the current 'origin/master' commit somewhere in its ancestry.

The "prevent rewrite" control only affects pushes.  It does not affect merges (via the PR merge button) since the resulting merge commit created by the pull-request merge button will always include current "origin/master" as one of the parent commits.