Create Pull Requests programmatically in BitBucket

On this one large project the bitbucket account has about 50 git repos in Atlassian BitBucket Cloud. Many of them are microservices that have e.g. similar Jenkinsfile, Dockerfile etc. Sometimes we need to make just one tweak across a whole bunch of repos, say to change the URL for a server because it was not parametrized. With JetBrains IDE (like IntelliJ, PyCharm, etc), it’s easy to do a search & replace, and then to do a bulk commit of all 50 repos for that one small change as you can use the same commit message, same referenced JIRA ticket number etc. A couple of button clicks and you’re done that part, piece of cake.

But then you have to create 50 pull requests!! I have no patience for that type of repetitive work. After a bit of digging and trial and error, I found a convenient way to create pull requests programmatically using bitbucket’s REST API:

1. Create one PR in the web UI on one of the repos. Write a useful title, description, select all the reviewers you might need across all repos, and don’t forget to checkmar the “Delete branch on merge”.
2. From a terminal shell, use curl https://api.bitbucket.org/2.0/repositories/YOUR_ORG_NAME/REPO_NAME/pullrequests/PR_NUMBER_JUST_CREATED -u USERNAME:PASSWORD | jq . > pr_get.json to get the JSON of that PR into a file. Note that your username is the one defined in your Profile Settings, and can be changed. For me it is not the name I use to login with.
3. Edit the file to remove most elements of it, keeping only the following: description, title, close_source_branch, reviewers, and source
4. In source element, keep only branch, remove the rest.
5. In the shell, use for repo in $REPOS; do curl -s https://api.bitbucket.org/2.0/repositories/YOUR_ORG_NAME/$repo/pullrequests --user USERNAME:PASSWORD --request POST --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data @pr_get.json; done where REPOS is your list of repos. So REPOS could be * if all folders in local folder are bitbucket git repos, or *-service if all bitbucket repos of interest end in -service, etc. You could get fancier and only do the curl if git status shows changes, etc.

You’re done! Visit bitbucket and marvel that all your Pull Requests are created.

PS. If you also want to merge the PRs created this way, before doing the above look at my other post Merge Pull Requests programmatically in BitBucket, as there is one small change to make.