How do I manually trigger a pull-requests pipeline on a PR?

Summary

Problem

You are using Bitbucket pipelines and have a pull-requests definition in your bitbucket-pipelines.yml file. Developers use [skip ci] in the commit messages of the source branch so that the pull-requests pipeline doesn't get triggered with every single commit pushed to the source branch.

When you want to trigger the pull-requests pipeline manually, you cannot do that from the UI because manual pipelines run on branches. The Run Pipeline dialog doesn't allow you to select a certain PR when triggering a pull-requests pipeline manually.

Solution

First solution

You can use our API to trigger a pull-requests pipeline for a specific PR from your computer (an example is included in the link):

• https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/bitbucket/rest/api-group-pipelines/#trigger-a-pull-request-pipeline

This will work even if the last commit of the source branch has [skip ci] in its message.

Second solution

In a clone of the repo, create an empty commit on the source branch without the [skip ci] option in the commit message:

git commit --allow-empty -m

"Empty commit to trigger the pull-requests pipeline"

Then, push this commit to the source branch.

When that empty commit is pushed to the source branch, the pull-requests pipeline will be triggered.

Notes:

We have a feature request for manually triggering a pull-requests pipeline from the UI for a certain PR. You can vote for it and watch it here:

• BCLOUD-23152 - Trigger a pull-requests pipeline manually from the UI for a specific PR (instead of branch)