Downgrade Bitbucket when upgrading with Server license to Bitbucket Data Center 8.15 and later

If you've upgraded your Bitbucket Server instance to Bitbucket 8.15 and later, you may come across the following error:

This Bitbucket version no longer supports Server licenses

This is because Bitbucket 8.14 is the last supported Server release.

There are no home directory or database upgrades run when upgrading from Server instances to Bitbucket 8.15 and later. Server customers will be able to safely downgrade from Bitbucket Data Center 8.15+.

To use Bitbucket, you'll need to downgrade your previous Bitbucket version to 8.14 or older:

  1. Stop Bitbucket by running ./stop-bitbucket.sh from <your new Bitbucket installation directory>/bin.

  2. Go to the installation directory of your previous Bitbucket version.

    1. In /bin, make sure that your BITBUCKET_HOME is set to your existing home directory through set-bitbucket-home.sh. If you use a BITBUCKET_HOME environment variable to specify the home directory location, no change is required.

    2. Start Bitbucket with ./start-bitbucket.sh.

  3. If your Bitbucket installation is configured to run the bundled search server, you may encounter the bundled search server failing to start after the downgrade with the following error message in the BITBUCKET_HOME/log/search logs:

    java.lang.IllegalStateException: cannot downgrade a node from version [1.3.12] to version [1.3.11]

    In this case, you should do the following to allow Bitbucket to repair the search data:

    1. Stop Bitbucket by running ./stop-bitbucket.sh from <your new Bitbucket installation directory>/bin.

    2. Delete the BITBUCKET_HOME/shared/search/data/.version file.

    3. Start Bitbucket with ./start-bitbucket.sh.


If you’d like to use Bitbucket 8.15 and later, you need to update your license to Data Center. To do this:

  1. Go to Administration > Licensing.

  2. Select Edit license and enter your Data Center license key.

  3. Select Save.

  4. Perform the upgrade to Bitbucket 8.15 and later.


Last modified on Mar 22, 2024

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