Problem Definition

Renaming a project/repository in Bitbucket Server creates an alias that permits the repository to be accessed using the old URL (this was implemented with BSERV-3751 - Allow historical aliasing of projects and repositories).

This permits repositories to be still accessible by clients without updating the remote address and helps in case of existing automated procedures (i.e. CI integrations) to not be disrupted by a repository rename.

At the same time this generates issues when a new repository with the same name of one of the aliases gets created.
The creation invalidates the previous alias and makes all the integrations now point to the new repository and has the potential to disrupt long or critical operations by only adding a repository with the "wrong" name.

Suggested Solution

Possible Solutions:

• Let the project admin set an option for the default behavior (Historical Aliases On/Off)
• When renaming a repository let the user choose to add a historical alias or not
• Highlight repositories having one or more active alias and let the repository admin delete the alias
• When creating a repository warn the user if that name is going to overwrite an existing alias

Why this is important

In environments where there is lot of automation in place and is not possible to keep track of the automations in place this could cause errors or delays in case long operations need to be performed.

In such environment having an automated operation fail is usually preferable to having the same operation performed using the wrong data (the new repository).

Workaround

It is possible to check the existing aliases in place for Bitbucket by checking the content of tables:

• bb_repository_alias
• bb_project_alias