We’re extremely excited to be kicking off the next chapter in the Bitbucket Cloud story. We have a range of exciting changes and enhancements coming to Bitbucket Cloud over the coming months that all start today, with our EAP of Forge in Bitbucket Cloud.
What is Forge?
Forge is Atlassian’s company-wide product extensibility framework that allows customers and partners to add “native like” functionality directly into existing Atlassian products. Imagine if you could write your own native features (back-end & front-end) and inject them directly into Atlassian products – that is what Forge allows you to do.
To learn more about Forge, check out the overview here: Forge Overview
Today, Forge is the platform that underpins the newest and most innovative 3rd party apps in the Atlassian Marketplace – but Forge is not just for building 3rd party apps. We believe this set of capabilities is going to provide a unique opportunity directly to our customers in Bitbucket Cloud, owing to the fact that most of our users are inherently “code first” in terms of how they choose to solve problems. We’re extremely excited to bring this capability to both customers and partners in Bitbucket Cloud, and we can’t wait to see the amazing solutions you all are able to build.
Why is Forge important in Bitbucket Cloud?
There is a fundamental issue that occurs when software tools grow to support larger and more complex customers and users. As the companies using a product get more complicated and unique, it becomes increasingly (often exponentially) difficult to meet those unique and vastly different requirements with standard “off-the-shelf” functionality.
This often leads to terrifyingly complex enterprise software tools that have 1000 different features, 990 of which only one or two customers ever use (not literally… but you get the idea). This is impossible to maintain, impossible to innovate, and a situation you never want to be in.
Bitbucket Cloud’s approach to tackling this challenge as we scale to support large complex organisations is to focus on the core Code & CI/CD experiences we specialise in, whilst also giving customers and users the tools they need to solve entire categories of problems themselves, using Bitbucket Cloud as a foundation.
We will do this by providing clean abstractions, well-defined interfaces, and easy to use extension points that will allow software teams to build exactly the solutions they need to solve their unique sets of problems, and then embed those solutions directly into their core workflow within Bitbucket Cloud.
We have a range of targeted sets of capabilities we are planning to release on top of this Forge powered foundation over the next 3-12 months, including Custom Merge Checks, Dynamic CI/CD Pipelines, and more.
Enough talking… how do I get started?
The first step to getting started building apps in Bitbucket Cloud with Forge is to complete the “Getting started with Forge” guide available here: Forge Overview
This will guide you through the basics of setting up your local environment with the core Forge tooling, required for building apps in any Atlassian product.
Once complete, you can start by working through our example Bitbucket Cloud Forge app tutorial. Instructions on how to do that are available here: Bitbucket Cloud Forge Tutorial
If you’re more of a visual learner, there is also a YouTube video where a member of our team walks through building a basic Forge app in Bitbucket Cloud available here: Bitbucket Cloud Forge App Live Code Webinar
The code for the app we build in that video is available in-full, here: Bitbucket Cloud Forge App Repository
For all these examples, you’ll need to reference the Bitbucket Cloud Forge Modules, Events, and Endpoints references:
Getting help, providing feedback, sharing ideas?
The community space will be the primary place for collaboration and communication during the Bitbucket Cloud x Forge EAP. We will share important updates there like new capability releases, roadmap updates, and any breaking changes.
This will also be where we will provide support to people participating in the EAP. If you have questions or need support, please create a post in that space so that we can help you get going. If you see someone else asking for help, and you have an answer, please get involved, so we can build this community up and make it valuable for everyone.
Please also use this space to provide feedback, request features, and let us know about any bugs or rough edges you find. We’re committed to making the Forge experience in Bitbucket cloud the best we can, but we’ll need your input to make that happen. Also note that it’s just as important for us to get feedback on our documentation, tutorials, and guides – so if you find something that doesn’t make sense, please let us know, so we can make it right.
And finally, when you build something exciting (or even just get your first “hello, world” up and running), please, share that progress here, so we can be part of that journey. We’re excited to see what people build, and the more ideas we see people implementing, the more ideas we can come up with to unlock even more potential.