bb — Bitbucket Cloud CLI

Open pull requests, read every comment, and write replies — without leaving the shell or opening a browser tab.

One binary, no runtime to install. Your API token lives in your OS keyring and is never printed, never written to disk, and never sent anywhere except api.bitbucket.org over TLS. bb update is the one command that talks to another host — it queries the GitHub Releases API without sending any credentials.

$ bb pr list
┌────┬──────────────────────────┬─────────────────┬───┬────────┬────────┬────────────┬──────────┐
│ ID ┆ TITLE                    ┆ SOURCE          ┆ → ┆ TARGET ┆ AUTHOR ┆ REVIEWERS  ┆ APPROVED │
╞════╪══════════════════════════╪═════════════════╪═══╪════════╪════════╪════════════╪══════════╡
│ 42 ┆ Cache session lookups    ┆ feat/cache      ┆ → ┆ main   ┆ dev    ┆ Ada, Linus ┆ Ada      │
│ 41 ┆ Fix token refresh window ┆ fix/token-clock ┆ → ┆ main   ┆ dev    ┆ Linus      ┆          │
└────┴──────────────────────────┴─────────────────┴───┴────────┴────────┴────────────┴──────────┘

Install

brew install biokraft/tap/bb

Recommended: updates via brew upgrade, no Rust toolchain needed.

Alternatives

Supported targets: aarch64-apple-darwin, x86_64-apple-darwin, x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.

The cargo routes install bb into ~/.cargo/bin — add that to your PATH if the command isn't found afterwards.

Authenticate

Atlassian removed Bitbucket Cloud app passwords on 2026-07-28. bb uses an Atlassian API token, sent as HTTP Basic auth with your account email as the username.

1. Create a token at https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/security/api-tokens, selecting the scopes below.
2. Run bb auth login and paste it — the input is masked and never echoed.

bb auth login     # prompts, verifies the token, then stores it in the OS keyring
bb auth logout    # removes the stored credentials
bb auth status    # shows the account; the token is always redacted to ****last4

Token scopes

Grant the least you need. For the pull request workflow — listing, reading and commenting — four scopes are enough:

One gotcha worth knowing: write:pullrequest:bitbucket does not imply read:repository:bitbucket, so pr create needs both.

CI and headless machines

There is no keyring on a CI runner, and on Linux the keyring backend is secret-service, which is absent on servers. Set the credentials in the environment instead — they are checked before the keyring, so this also works as a local override:

export BB_EMAIL='you@example.com'
export BB_TOKEN='...'
bb pr list --json

Check it works

bb --version
bb auth status                              # exits 2 until you log in
cd any-bitbucket-repo && bb pr list

Usage

bb --help lists every command, and bb <command> --help documents its flags. The shape is bb <noun> <verb>:

bb pr list                                # open PRs, with reviewers and approvals
bb pr view 42 --unresolved                # the PR plus comment threads still needing action
bb pr create main --title "Add caching"   # source branch inferred from your checkout
bb pr comment 42 -f src/auth.rs -l 88 -b "off by one"
bb branch list --user alice
bb update                                 # check for a newer release and update

bb update compares your version against the latest GitHub release. If Homebrew or cargo installed bb, it prints the right upgrade command for that package manager instead of overwriting a file they manage. For a standalone binary it verifies the download's checksum and replaces itself atomically.

One thing worth knowing that --help won't tell you:

Everything speaks JSON. Add --json to any command and pipe it to jq rather than parsing the tables, whose layout is not a contract. Scripts and agents should default to it.

bb pr list --json | jq -r '.[] | select(.approvals == []) | "\(.id)\t\(.title)"'

Shell completions make the rest discoverable:

bb completions zsh > ~/.zfunc/_bb         # also bash, fish, powershell, elvish

Use it from an AI Agent

This repository ships an Agent Skill — the portable SKILL.md format that Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode all read. It teaches the agent to review pull requests through bb rather than ask you to open a browser: the --json contract, the comment and reply flags, the exit codes, and what to do when a scope is missing.

Install it into a project:

mkdir -p .agents/skills/bitbucket-cloud
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/biokraft/bbcloud/main/.agents/skills/bitbucket-cloud/SKILL.md \
  -o .agents/skills/bitbucket-cloud/SKILL.md

mkdir -p .claude/skills
ln -s ../../.agents/skills/bitbucket-cloud .claude/skills/bitbucket-cloud

To get the skill in every project, install it under your home directory instead: ~/.agents/skills/ for Codex, Cursor and OpenCode, ~/.claude/skills/ for Claude Code.

Each agent loads the skill by itself when a task touches Bitbucket. To force it, name it: "use the bitbucket-cloud skill". If your tool reads no skills at all, paste the file into AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md — it is plain Markdown.

Reference

Platform support

macOS (arm64, x86_64) and Linux (x86_64, aarch64), both covered by CI. Windows is not supported.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Before opening a PR, run cargo fmt --all --check, cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings, and cargo test — CI enforces all three.

rust-toolchain.toml pins the exact toolchain used for those checks (currently 1.97), which rustup auto-installs on first use but which a contributor building offline needs to already have.

Security reports: please use GitHub's private vulnerability reporting rather than a public issue.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. This project is an independent Rust rewrite of the MIT-licensed PHP bb-cli; see NOTICE for attribution.