Transferring a Bitbucket Repository

I recently needed to move control of a source control repository on Bitbucket from a personal account to a company account. Fortunately, there’s a relatively easy built-in process to transfer it between accounts. In this post, I’ll show how it’s done.

1. Open the repository in Bitbucket
2. Click on Settings at the bottom of the left navigation
3. Click on Transfer repository under General
4. Choose the new owner and click the Transfer Ownership button
5. Login to Bitbucket as with the account of the new owner
6. Click on the user icon in the upper right and select “Inbox”
7. You’ll see a message with the transfer request. (It will also be e-mailed to the account owner.)
8. Open the message and click the link that it contains
9. Click the Accept button to transfer the repository
10. Now that the repository has been transferred, it takes you to the Access management screen so you can add users to the repository as needed.
11. If anyone already had Source Tree set up to use the repository, they will need to update the repository settings to point to the new location.
    • If you try to commit to the original repo url, you get a 404 error when trying to push:
    • Open the repository in Source Tree
    • Click on the Settings button in the upper right hand corner (or select Repository > Repository Settings)
    • Click on the default repository to select it
    • Click the Edit button
    • Update the URL to replace the previous Bitbucket account name to the new one in two places in the URL