Symptoms

If you have another Atlassian application (or another Java web application) available at the same hostname and context path as Bitbucket Server, you may experience problems such as:

• being unable to log in to Bitbucket Server
• being unable to set your Bitbucket Server license or otherwise complete the Bitbucket Server installation wizard
• being unexpectedly logged out of Bitbucket Server, for example after logging in to another Atlassian application such as Confluence or Bamboo.

Cause

Java web applications identify your session by setting a cookie in your browser. This cookie is bound to the hostname and path that each application is deployed to, but ignores the port. Applications that reside at URLs where only the port is different may unintentionally overwrite each other's session information, resulting in lost sessions.

You will experience these problems if you are running your Atlassian (or other Java) applications on the same URL path with the only difference between applications being the port. Examples are:

http://localhost:8080 and http://localhost:8090
http://your.domain.com:8080 and http://your.domain.com:8090 

This can occur with 2 instances of the same Atlassian application (e.g. Bitbucket Server) or with 2 different applications (e.g. Confluence and Bitbucket Server). This can also happen with any 2 Java applications, whether from Atlassian, or not.

Note that this is not the same problem that is caused by running multiple Atlassian applications in a single application server (e.g. Tomcat) container.

Resolution

The recommended resolution is to change the context path for Bitbucket Server. Please see Change Bitbucket's context path.

Ideally, you want to perform this action for other products:

• Changing Bamboo's root context path
• Change the context path used to access Jira server
• (Archived) How to change the Confluence context path
• How Do I Set The Fisheye/Crucible Context Path Manually In "config.xml"

A possible workaround is to use separate browsers when accessing each application (for example Firefox and Chrome).

Note that:

• Deploying multiple Atlassian applications in a single Tomcat container is not supported, so the use of name-based virtual hosting is not recommended.
• Because JIRA and Confluence both make heavy use of the CPU, Atlassian recommends running JIRA and Confluence on different physical machines, behind an Apache web server.