These days developing software can feel a lot like running in a relay race, pushing ever faster to pass the baton amongst your teammates. The quicker you can push new features, bug-fixes, or performance improvements out to your customers the greater the competitive edge in the market.

There are many ways to improve speed overall, but one of the most tried and true techniques is to make yourself more productive. Bitbucket Server and Data Center 5.5 aim to help you do just that through two new enhancements to the development workflow: personal access tokens, and rebase workflows.

Read on to learn more, or click below to get started with Bitbucket Server 5.5 now.

Download Bitbucket Server 5.5

Integrate securely with personal access tokens

If you’re like us, you love to have quick and easy access to development information. Whether it’s populating your wall board with stats or sending data to other tooling in your ecosystem, it usually means interfacing with Bitbucket Server’s REST API. Before today this required the use of basic-auth, making it necessary to either use your own user credentials or create a dedicated ‘service or bot user’ to make those calls. This doesn’t exactly instill warm and fuzzy feelings in your sys admin, nor does it encourage you to create more integrations.

Bitbucket Server 5.5 introduces personal access tokens, which take the place of basic auth passwords in calls to Git or the REST API. These access tokens are created on a per user basis inheriting the same level of permissions as that user, minus the ability to log into the Bitbucket user interface. You also have the option to apply further restrictions, like limiting to read access only. Personal access tokens makes integrations available to all users, saving developers’ time and the headache of dealing with the risk that comes with using your LDAP username/password.

Personal access tokens in Bitbucket Server

Clean up commit history with rebase workflows

Rebasing (the process of moving or combining a sequence of commits to a new base commitis a popular option of development teams to incorporate changes into their codebase. It keeps the complexity of your repository graph low and makes commit history much easier to grok. Until today, the decision to use a rebasing workflow in Bitbucket Server would take you away from the natural flow and benefits of merging via the user interface, requiring a manual workaround on the client side. Not only was this an inconvenience but also increased the potential for error.

In Bitbucket Server 5.5, developers can now opt to rebase to bring a pull request branch up to date or complete the pull request altogether. If a rebase workflow is something your team understands and wants to use, simply enable it as a pull request merge strategy in your project or repository settings. If you’d like an in-depth explanation of rebasing and how Bitbucket Server tackles it, check out this demo by our Principal Product Manager, Roger Barnes, below:

Try Bitbucket Server 5.5

With the addition of personal access tokens and rebasing, tailoring your workflow to what’s best for your team gets a whole lot easier. Focus on writing software, instead of worrying about credentials for integrations, or jumping through hoops for a clean commit history. Give Bitbucket Server 5.5 a try today and see how small improvements can make a big impact.

Download Bitbucket Server 5.5

Bitbucket Server 5.5 brings personal access tokens and rebase workflows