Last month we announced the beginning of our Bitbucket Server & DC 5.x series with an enhanced focus on helping our customers achieve DevOps success. Today we’re taking aim at the management side of DevOps by making the administration of your development toolset easier with Bitbucket Server and Data Center 5.1.
Keep reading to learn about GPG signed commits, pull request deletion, and other new features in 5.1.
GPG signed commits
For those practicing DevOps, Git has become the preferred version control system for its flexibility and speed. This flexibility is powerful but also extremely hard to control without a tool like Bitbucket. For organizations who need to run a tight ship (e.g. adhering to regulatory requirements), Bitbucket’s permissions, merge restrictions, and hooks help immensely. Today we’re adding an additional security measure with the Verify Commit Signature hook, which rejects all commits that are not signed with a GPG public key. Coupling this with the committer verification hook, you can be assured that all the commits in Bitbucket are valid and secure. To learn more about toggling hooks on and off, see our repository hooks guide.
Pull request deletion
Next up is a highly requested improvement to our pull request workflow, the ability to delete them. Have you ever created a pull request by mistake? Or found a pull request to be obsolete? In Bitbucket Server 5.1, irrelevant pull requests can now be deleted instead of declined, leaving your PR history nice and clean. Pull request deletion is now enabled by default for pull request authors and repository administrators.
Search improvements
Last year we brought code search to Bitbucket Server, allowing teams to search for code across all repositories stored in Bitbucket.
For teams making extensive use of forks, the process of building an index for search can use a fair amount of disk space. In Bitbucket Server 5.1, we’re introducing a way for administrators to keep search disk space under control by limiting what actually gets indexed. For example, you can restrict the index process to exclude synced forks, which reduces disk space and provides refined search results.
In addition, we’ve also updated our Elasticsearch guides for Data Center customers, providing more guidance on deploying an Elasticsearch instance.
One more thing: In Bitbucket Server 5.1, we’re laying the foundation for project level settings, allowing project admins to configure items, such as branching model and permissions, across all repositories in a project. To learn more about project level settings and other improvements and bug fixes in 5.1, see our release notes.