Draft pull requests

There are time when you would like to avoid unnecessary feedback or accidental merging until your pull request is ready. By creating a draft pull request, you can clearly signal to your team that the work is still in progress. You can still use all of Bitbucket’s collaborative features to get early feedback while your pull request is a draft, but merging is prevented and any reviewers you add won’t be notified until your mark your draft as ready.

Create a draft pull request

You start creating a draft pull request in the same way as you create a regular pull request. When you’re ready to save the draft pull request, select Create as draft.

Check out the more detailed guidelines:

1. From the open repository, select the Create button and select Pull request in the This repository section of the dropdown menu.

2. Fill out the pull request form.

   1. Source: The source repository and branch is where you made your code changes that you want to merge.

   2. Destination: The destination repository and branch is where you want to merge the source.

   3. Title and Description: You'll see both in email notifications, and the title appears in the pull request list.

   4. Reviewers: Add or select reviewers who will give effective feedback and to make others aware of the changes. Reviewers added to a draft pull request will be notified when the pull request is marked as ready. Note: Feel free to skip adding reviewers when you’re only creating a draft pull request. You can add them later. For example, when editing the draft to make it ready for review.

   5. Diff and Commits: Check these tabs to compare new changes and see relevant commits.

3. Select Create as draft.

Your draft pull request has been created and you can continue your work.

Make a draft pull request ready for review

When you’re ready to share your code for further review and merge, you can mark your draft pull request as ready for review. To do this, select the Mark as ready button.

At this stage, you can also add reviewers to your pull request manually or, if applicable, manage the automatically added default reviewers or code owners with the corresponding quick add buttons under the Reviewers field.

Your draft will immediately become ready for review and merge, just as your regular pull requests. In the activity history, the pull request will be marked as Ready for review (READY FOR REVIEW). The reviewers you’ve added will receive an email notification about the pull request made ready for review.

Convert a regular pull request to a draft

If you want to convert your pull request back to draft to continue working on it in silence, go to the pull request action menu (…) and select Mark as draft. In the activity history, the pull request will be marked as Draft (DRAFT).

Review a draft pull request

You review draft pull requests in the same way as you review regular pull requests: you can approve drafts or request changes to them. These reviewer statuses will remain after the draft pull request is marked as ready for review.

Note that until a draft is marked as ready for review, it isn’t eligible for merging, either manually or automatically.

View draft pull requests

By default, draft pull requests are hidden from the list of pull requests in your Bitbucket instance. To view draft pull requests:

1. Go to the Pull requests page.

2. Select the Status filter dropdown.

3. Select the Draft checkbox to filter the pull request list to display any draft pull requests.

Drafts will be displayed on the list with other pull requests in the order based on the time of their last update.