Allowing public access to code

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You can open up public access for anonymous (unauthenticated) users to projects and repositories in Bitbucket Server. This allows you to:

  • Broadcast your repositories to a wider audience who generally don't have access to your source.
  • Utilize unauthenticated cloning of repositories when setting up continuous integration servers to work with Bitbucket Server.
  • Link from other systems, for example Jira applications or Confluence, to give users access to code without requiring authentication.
  • Create opensource projects or repositories.


Public access allows anonymous users to browse the files and commits for a specific repository or an entire project, and to clone repositories, without needing to log in, or have an account in Bitbucket Server.

In Bitbucket Server, you can:

  • Configure a specific repository for public access.
  • Configure a project to allow public access to all repositories in the project.
  • Disable anonymous access by setting a global system property.

Making a repository publicly accessible

If you have admin level permissions for a specific repository, you can make it publicly available for anonymous access.

Go to the repository and click Settings, then Repository (under 'Permissions'). Check Enable (under 'Public Access') to allow users without a Bitbucket Server account to clone and browse the repository.

Making a project publicly accessible

If you have admin level permissions for a project, you can make the project publicly available for anonymous access.

This doesn't apply to private projects. 

Go to the project and choose Settings, then Permissions. Check Enable (under 'Public Access') to allow users without a Bitbucket Server account to clone and browse any repository in the project.

Viewing public repositories

Bitbucket Server displays a list of repositories for which anonymous access has been enabled.

Anonymous and logged-in users can choose Repositories > View all public repositories to see these.

Disabling public access globally

Bitbucket Server provides a system property that allows you to turn off public access for the whole instance.

To do this, set the feature.public.access property to false in the bitbucket.properties file in your Bitbucket Server home directory.

Last modified on Feb 2, 2021

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