Managing apps
An app is an installable component that supplements or enhances the functionality of Bitbucket Data Center in some way. For example, the Awesome Graphs for Bitbucket enables you to track your team's activity and progress. Other apps are available for adding graphs to Bitbucket, importing SVN source control projects, and accessing Atlassian support.
Bitbucket comes with many pre-installed apps (called system apps). You can install more apps, either by acquiring the app from the Atlassian Marketplace or by uploading it from your file system. This means that you can install apps you have developed yourself. For information about developing your own apps for Bitbucket, see Bitbucket Developer Documentation.
On this page
About the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM)
You administer apps for Bitbucket using the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM). The UPM is itself an app that exposes app administration pages in the Bitbucket Administration Console. UPM works across Atlassian applications, providing a consistent interface for administering apps in Bitbucket, Crucible, Confluence, Fisheye, Jira applications, and Bamboo.
UPM comes pre-installed in recent versions of all Atlassian applications, so you do not normally need to install it yourself. However, like other apps, the UPM software is subject to regular software updates. Before administering apps in Bitbucket, therefore, you should verify your version of the UPM and update it if needed.
Administering apps in Bitbucket
You can update UPM, or any app, from the UPM's own app administration pages. Additionally, you can perform these tasks from the UPM administration pages:
- Install or remove apps
- Configure app settings
- Discover and install new apps from the Atlassian Marketplace
- Enable or disable apps and their component modules
It shows only those plugins that are supported in your version of the product, so that you do not install incompatible plugins.
If the app request feature is enabled in your Atlassian application, non-administrative users can also discover apps on the Atlassian Marketplace. Instead of installing the apps, however, these users have the option of requesting the apps from you, the administrator of the Atlassian application.
For more information on administering the app request feature or performing other common app administration tasks, see the Universal Plugin Manager documentation. For an end-user's view of requesting apps in Bitbucket, see Requesting apps.
Starting from Bitbucket 8.15.4 and in the following 8.15.x bugfix releases, app installation with UPM from files and through the REST API is disabled by default. However, you can install apps from the Marketplace on the Find apps page without any restrictions.
If app installation from files and through the REST API is an integral part of your workflow, we strongly recommend setting the relevant property to enable it prior to the upgrade.
To enable app installation with these two methods, in the bitbucket.properties file, set the property upm.plugin.upload.enabled=true.
Then, restart Bitbucket for the changes to take effect. If you run a Bitbucket cluster, a rolling restart is enough to pick up the configuration properties you set to enable the features.
Apps for Bitbucket Data Center
Installing, and managing, apps for Bitbucket Data Center is done in the same way, as described above. The only requirement is that the app is Data Center-compatible – see Bitbucket Data Center Apps for compatibility information.
You can install an app from any cluster node. The app is stored on the shared file system for the Bitbucket Data Center, and made available to all nodes in the cluster.