In Bitbucket Server 5.9, there are improvements for both admins and developers. Bitbucket admins can identify and track causes of degradation, like third-party or custom apps, with a new diagnostics tool and UI. Pull requests and code searches reflect developers’ workflow expectations and offer greater continuity when moving between the command line and Bitbucket Server. Now, you can search commits or edit commit messages when merging. Keep reading to learn more or get started with Bitbucket Server 5.9 now.
Understanding Bitbucket performance
It’s 11pm and you get a Pagerduty alert. Your stomach drops in anticipation of major performance degradation or outright system failure. For Bitbucket Server administrators, we never want to be the source of your on-call nightmares. Performance degradation of a git server can impact hours of productivity or an important release, but issues caused by third-party apps frustrate even the most patient admin.
With Bitbucket Server 5.9, we’ve surfaced diagnostics tools for administrators within Bitbucket UI. Admins can get an overview of Bitbucket system health with a summary of alerts & events for the last 30 days. Diagnostics lists events of different severities: an error, a warning, or simply worth noting. Using this new information, admins can proactively address issues which may lead to more serious problems or tackle system errors before users begin to report them.
Diagnostics also supports event filtering by node, date, or time. For persistent issues or on-going anti-patterns, this provides a level of traceability so admins aren’t stuck searching HipChat to create a timeline or identify a problematic node.
Scaling and improving search
For developers, we’ve made search a little smarter. Navigating to the commit view has previously been tricky, making it hard to jump from an IDE blame into Bitbucket to get context. Now, you can search for code, commits, or repositories. But commit search isn’t the only improvement. Have you ever looked used a period or an underscore in search, hoping to find a file or a variable name? Previously, these punctuation marks were stripped, making it frustrating to find the right result. Results now surface more relevant code with respect to these punctuation marks.
But beneath each code or repository query lies Elasticsearch. With the bundled instance for server and clusters for data center, Elasticsearch is critical to developer productivity, but its performance is an admin responsibility. As of Bitbucket Server 5.7, we’ve added support for Elasticsearch 5.5, allowing admins to upgrade from an end-of-life version.
Pull request enhancements
Bitbucket Server is home and hearth to pull requests and git workflows. We should know since we wrote the handbook. To make your software development team’s workflow more effective:
- commit messages can be edited on merge
- dependent pull requests can retarget your default development branch
- Jira issue details expand as a new default
What used to take clever workarounds is now a click away.
