Introducing increased control over forking in Bitbucket Cloud

We recently announced our deep commitment to keeping your code secure in the cloud. With that, we are excited to announce a setting that gives admins increased controls over forking outside their Bitbucket workspace.

Currently, a user can fork content from a repository into a workspace outside of your private workspace. While there are some use cases where this is useful, we also understand why a lot of you would like to prevent forks outside your workspace to better protect your code. With the launch of this setting, all workspace admins will now be able to configure their workspaces to ensure no code is forked out.

How it works

To enable this setting, go to Workspace settings and select the Do not allow forking of private repositories to other workspaces setting.

When this feature is enabled, private repositories cannot be forked outside of the workspace. Note that this does not include content inside a public repository, as public repositories are used to collaborate with users outside your organization.

Benefits of using this feature

By preventing forks outside your workspace, you can expect:

  • Increased Control: Workspace admins gain more control over their workspaces. You can decide whether or not you want to allow content from a private repository to be forked outside the workspace.
  • Enhanced Privacy: By ensuring that users cannot fork outside of your managed workspace, you can prevent accidental exposure of sensitive data. Users will not be able to fork private repositories outside of your workspace.
  • Better Tracing: Changes to forked content is tracked in audit logs which is available via Atlassian Guard.

What’s next?

We’re continuing to invest in improving the privacy and security of workspaces and the projects and repositories within them. You can read more about all the features we've shipped in the privacy and security space in this Bitbucket blog.