Start your upgrade! Bitbucket Data Center 8.19 LTS is now available

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Hello, Data Center Community,

We’re excited to announce that Bitbucket 8.19 is now live as the latest Bitbucket Data Center Long Term Support (LTS) release!

Why choose a Long Term Support release?

Upgrading to a Long Term Support release provides you with continued access to critical security, stability, data integrity and performance fixes for the full two years before this version reaches its end of life. It enables you to move quickly when a high-impact bug fix, or security fix is ported over and released for upgrading.

What you unlock by updating to this LTS

Bitbucket 8.19 brings the familiar security and performance advantages typically associated with LTS releases, plus brand-new functionalities aimed at enhancing the effectiveness and experience of both admins and end-users.

Check out just a few of the new features now available!

Enhanced Security

• Support of security keys for Git over SSH: Establish a secure connection with Bitbucket Data Center when you are performing Git operations from your local machine or when another system or process needs access to repositories in Bitbucket.

• SSH keys support for signing commits and tags: Use personal SSH keys not only to access a Bitbucket instance but also to sign your commits and tags for easy security measures.

• X.509 (S/MIME) certificates support for signing commits and tags: Be sure that your code is following your organization’s security and compliance policy by signing commits with X.509 certificates and giving admins control over who pushes code changes through the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

• Auto-signing system commits with GPG: Comply with even the strictest security and compliance standards by having Bitbucket use a system public GPG key to automatically sign system commits which prevents failures and errors when you’re checking commits for signatures, having all signed commits merged into subsequent pull requests, or verifying commit signatures through your local Git installation.

• Easy differentiation of signed and unsigned commits: Increase transparency and work toward your security and compliance goals by viewing the status of commit signature verification next to a commit hash on the Commits page.

• Comprehensive security enhancements: Enjoy peace of mind knowing your instance defaults to secure, as public access, hook script support, and app installation through file upload or REST API are now disabled by default.

Powerful productivity for developers and admins

• Dark theme for the user interface: Control the way you work in Bitbucket by enabling dark theme and enjoy reduced eye strain and consistency with other applications.

• Auto-merge pull requests: Save significant time by having Bitbucket merge your pull requests for you when all merge checks have passed.

• Custom templates for commit: Establish a standard practice for your pull requests with consistent, informative commit messages by configuring a custom template that will be used to populate commit messages in the merge modal.

• Draft pull requests: Enjoy clear collaboration by marking a pull request as being in draft to signal to your team that the work is still in progress and prevent the pull request from accidentally being merged.

• Configure code owners: Easily find the right people to notify or request reviews by adding code owners to your repository and having them automatically added to pull requests in the areas of the code base they own.

• Find and manage licensed users: Make confident decisions on license usage and plan your future licensing costs as you can now identify licensed users in the global list of all users from external and internal user directories.

See the full list of features available in the Bitbucket 8.19 release notes.

Note that if you are currently on Bitbucket 7.21, this version ended life on March 2, 2014.

Thanks for being part of our community!

Bitbucket Data Center Team