Product Overview of Bitbucket
Bitbucket is a comprehensive Git-based source code repository hosting service owned by Atlassian, designed to facilitate collaborative software development and version control for professional teams.
What Bitbucket Does
Bitbucket provides a central platform for managing Git repositories, enabling developers to collaborate on source code, and guiding them through the entire development workflow. It offers both commercial plans and free accounts, including unlimited private repositories for free accounts.
Key Features and Functionality
Bitbucket Cloud
- Pull Requests and Code Review: Allows developers to submit changes for review and discussion before integrating them into the main codebase. This feature includes comments and feedback mechanisms to enhance collaboration.
- Bitbucket Pipelines: An integrated Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) service that automates building, testing, and deploying code based on configurations defined in a
bitbucket-pipelines.ymlfile. It supports language-specific templates and multiple pipelines. - Branching: Enables developers to work on different versions of the codebase without affecting the main branch. Users can create various types of branches (e.g.,
main,develop,production) to manage different stages of development. - Security Features: Includes two-step verification, required two-step verification, IP whitelisting, and merge checks to ensure secure access and code integrity.
- Git Large File Storage (LFS): Supports the storage of large files, which is particularly useful for projects involving large media files or binaries.
- Documentation and Wikis: Automatically renders README files in various Markdown-like formats and provides wikis for project documentation.
- Issue Tracking: Allows teams to manage issues and bugs within the platform.
- Static Sites: Supports hosting static websites with the
bitbucket.iodomain. - Add-ons and Integrations: Offers a marketplace for integrating third-party applications and tools, enhancing the functionality of Bitbucket.
Bitbucket Server
- On-Premises Solution: Bitbucket Server is a commercial software product that can be licensed for on-premises deployment. It is written in Java and built with Apache Maven.
- Integration with Atlassian Tools: Provides seamless integration with other Atlassian products, such as Jira, to enhance project management and collaboration.
- Access Control: Allows users to control read and write access to the code, ensuring that only authorized personnel can make changes.
- Free for Eligible Organizations: Atlassian offers Bitbucket Server for free to non-profit, non-government, non-academic, non-commercial, non-political, and secular organizations that meet specific criteria.
Additional Features
- Smart Mirroring: Enhances performance by reducing the load on the main Git server through smart mirroring of repositories.
- Advanced Auditing: Provides detailed logging and tracking of actions within the instance, which can be exported and stored in third-party monitoring tools.
- HTTP Access Tokens: Allows teams to create access tokens not tied to individual user accounts, facilitating project-specific access.
- OAuth 2.0 Provider: Configures Bitbucket as an OAuth 2.0 provider, enabling external applications to access Bitbucket securely.
Use Cases
Bitbucket is widely used by over 9 lakh teams and 50 lakh developers globally for various purposes, including:
- Managing Git repositories and collaborating on source code.
- Automating CI/CD pipelines.
- Enhancing security through advanced access controls and auditing.
- Integrating with other development tools and Atlassian products.
In summary, Bitbucket is a robust platform that streamlines software development by providing a suite of features that support version control, collaboration, security, and automation, making it an essential tool for professional development teams.