Welcome to the EAP for Forge in Bitbucket Cloud!

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Welcome to the EAP for Forge in Bitbucket Cloud!

We’re extremely excited to be kicking off the next chapter in the Bitbucket Cloud story. We have a range of exciting changes and enhancements coming to Bitbucket Cloud over the coming months that all start today, with our EAP of Forge in Bitbucket Cloud.

What is Forge?

Forge is Atlassian's company-wide product extensibility framework that allows customers and partners to add “native like” functionality directly into existing Atlassian products. Imagine if you could write your own native features (back-end & front-end) and inject them directly into Atlassian products - that’s what Forge allows you to do.

To learn more about Forge, check out the overview here: About Forge

Today, Forge is the platform that underpins the newest and most innovative 3rd party apps in the Atlassian Marketplace, but it’s not just for building 3rd party apps. We believe this suite of capabilities is going to provide a unique opportunity directly to our customers in Bitbucket Cloud, owing to the fact that most of our users are inherently “code first” in terms of how they choose to solve problems. We’re extremely excited to bring this capability to both customers and partners in Bitbucket Cloud and we can’t wait to see the amazing solutions you all are able to build.

Why are we running this Beta?

Forge is a healthy and mature part of the Atlassian Ecosystem, but it’s brand-new to Bitbucket Cloud. The team has been working hard over the last 12 months to bring the power of Forge to Bitbucket Cloud and we’re ready to start getting customer and partner feedback on this new and exciting set of tools.

With all that being said, Forge is a powerful, yet complex system and we know that we’re probably not going to get it 100% right first time. The purpose of this EAP is to get this new capability in front of our users as early as possible in the process so that you can start experimenting with the new systems, learn what works and what doesn’t, and give us feedback so that we can make Forge in Bitbucket Cloud the best solution possible.

As mentioned earlier, we’ve got a whole range of exciting new features planned for Bitbucket Cloud, built on top of Forge as the “engine” that will drive them. For that reason, it’s critical that we have a core Forge experience that is simple to use, reliable, and does what people expect. This will be the foundation for everything that follows.

What does “EAP” mean in this context?

There are some standard Terms & Conditions that you must be aware of before participating in this EAP program. For the purposes of that attachment, the word “EAP” and “EAP” should be considered to mean the same thing.

The key things you need to be aware of though are:

• We reserve the right to make breaking API changes at any point during the EAP without a formal deprecation notice or period. (Obviously we will do everything possible to avoid this, but it might happen).

• The functionality made available during the EAP is not officially “supported”, meaning if you contact the Bitbucket Cloud Support channels to ask about the EAP, they will not be able to assist you.

  • All support requests and questions must be surfaced in this Community space. We have members of the engineering team in here every day keeping an eye on questions and conversations, and other community members will also be able to help.

• We do not provide any service level guarantees regarding Forge stability, uptime, or performance during the EAP. (Again, obviously, we will do absolutely everything we can to ensure a smooth and consistent experience, but things can go wrong in a EAP environment).

By choosing to interact with the Forge functionality in Bitbucket Cloud, we will take that to indicate you have read and agreed to those conditions.

What can I actually do during the Forge EAP?

The set of capabilities available to participants for extending Bitbucket Cloud with Forge will be growing over the course of the EAP. We plan to increase the number of UI extension points and Business Events that can be used by Forge apps and we need your input to help us prioritise what we add and what order we add them in.

As of the time of writing, the following extension points are available:

• Repository code overview card

• Repository code overview action

• Repository pull request card

• Repository pull request action

• Repository main menu page

• Repository settings menu page

As we release additional modules, their details will be published here: Modules Reference.

The following product events are also available:

Repository:

• Created: avi:bitbucket:created:repository

• Updated: avi:bitbucket:updated:repository

• Pushed: avi:bitbucket:pushed:repository

• Deleted: avi:bitbucket:deleted:repository

Pull request:

• Created: avi:bitbucket:created:pullrequest

• Updated: avi:bitbucket:updated:pullrequest

• Fulfilled: avi:bitbucket:fulfilled:pullrequest

• Rejected: avi:bitbucket:rejected:pullrequest

• Comment created: avi:bitbucket:created:pullrequest-comment

• Comment updated: avi:bitbucket:updated:pullrequest-comment

• Comment deleted: avi:bitbucket:deleted:pullrequest-comment

As we release additional events, their details will be published here: Events Reference.

The list of API endpoints that can be accessed from Forge is available here: Endpoints with Forge App scopes

Enough talking… how do I get started?

The first step to getting started building apps in Bitbucket Cloud with Forge is to complete the “Getting started with Forge” guide available here: https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/getting-started/.

This will guide you through the basics of setting up your local environment with the core Forge tooling, required for building apps in any Atlassian product.

Once complete, you can start by working through our example Bitbucket Cloud Forge app tutorial. Instructions on how to do that are available here: https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/build-a-hello-world-app-in-bitbucket/

If you’re more of a visual learner, there is also a Youtube video where a member of our team walks through building a basic Forge app in Bitbucket Cloud available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b76an0an0rQ

The code for the app we build in that video is available in-full, here: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/dd23-forge-bitbucket/src/master/

For all these examples, you’ll need to reference the Bitbucket Cloud Forge Modules, Events, and Endpoints references listed in the previous section.

Getting help, providing feedback, sharing ideas?

This community space will be the primary place for collaboration and communication during the Bitbucket Cloud x Forge EAP. We will share important updates here like new capability releases, roadmap updates, and any breaking changes.

This will also be where we will provide support to people participating in the EAP. If you have questions or need support, please create a post in this space so that we can help you get going. If you see someone else asking for help and you have an answer, please get involved so we can build this community up and make it valuable for everyone.

Please also use this space to provide feedback, request features, and let us know about any bugs or rough edges you find. We’re committed to making the Forge experience in Bitbucket cloud the best we can, but we’ll need your input to make that happen. Also note that it’s just as important for us to get feedback on our documentation, tutorials, and guides - so if you find something that doesn’t make sense, please let us know so we can make it right.

And finally, when you build something exciting (or even just get your first “hello, world” up and running), please, share that progress here so we can be part of that journey. We’re excited to see what people build, and the more ideas we see people implementing, the more ideas we can come up with to unlock even more potential.