OMG, it's been requested for 10.5 years.
I saw this feature on Github & thought it was "common" things until today I jump into this.

Howdy! Netlify has worked around this, so deploy previews for pull requests work on Netlify!  https://www.netlify.com/blog/collaborative-deploy-previews-bitbucket/ 

another reason to convince boss to switch to some other provider!  

Go fix this please we don't pay you guys for jack shit.

@denise garcia, I'm sorry but this issue is about having a PR ref that holds the state of a PR's source branch, this ticket is not and never has been about a merge ref. I actually see many reasons why that idea would be wrong, because it's the repo's maintainer's responsibility to manage the rebasing/merging policy of their codebase. Also I don't see why/how people would want something that complex, when you don't even have the "simple" use case handled: have a ref to the PR's source branch.

Anyway, I'm just lurking this ticket as new people come by my answer on SO (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25967034/checkout-bitbucket-pull-requests-locally/40948201) as I don't have anymore any repository on bb ☺. It's entertaining to see that an issue can stay open longer than most characters starred in NCIS.

Hello everyone,

My name is Denise and I am a Product Manager on Bitbucket Cloud. I appreciate your input and understand the benefit of having PR 'merge' refs to quickly checkout a preview of the merged code. To set the right expectations, we will not be addressing this feature in the near term.

We are committed to keeping you up to date on this ticket as openness and transparency is important to us even if the news we are sharing is upsetting. You can find our public roadmap here.

Please continue to upvote this ticket in the meantime and also share details about your workflows that will help us design the best possible solution once this is prioritized.

We have also split out a new ticket, which tracks interest in a PR ref that holds the state of a PR's source branch, as it is a separate feature request from this ticket (PR 'merge' ref). Please indicate interest in that kind of PR ref on the new ticket so that we can gauge customer interest for that as well.

Cheers,
Denise Garcia

Wow. Thought it was hilariously old at 7 years when the official response was that it was on the roadmap. At that time we moved all our repositories over to Github for many reasons, including this one. Just popped over to see how things were going, and not surprised, another 3 years have passed with no resolution. 

Anyone stumbling over this for the first time, just move your repos to Github or Gitlab asap. Bitbucket will give you headaches forever.

Started learning Cloud recently and ... 

if I get it right I am not able to checkout open PR by git for validation on remote machine.

I must say your Cloud is really weird.

BB server - refs/pull-requests/ONELOVE

Maybe one of Ming`s Children will resolve this someday! 

Wow, it's been 10 years!!!!