How to Set Up Branch-Specific Pipelines in Bitbucket Pipelines

By Daniel Zoghalchali·Latchkey

The branches: section maps branch names or glob patterns to their own pipelines.

Under pipelines.branches, each key is a branch name or glob. Bitbucket runs the matching pipeline on a push, falling back to default for unmatched branches.

Tailor pipelines per branch

Give main a deploy pipeline and feature branches a test-only pipeline.

pipelines:
  default:
    - step:
        name: Test
        script:
          - npm ci
          - npm test
  branches:
    main:
      - step:
          name: Deploy
          deployment: production
          script:
            - ./deploy.sh
    'feature/*':
      - step:
          name: Lint and test
          script:
            - npm ci
            - npm run lint
            - npm test

Notes

• A matching branches: entry overrides default for that branch entirely.
• Glob patterns like feature/* let one definition cover many branches; teams wanting richer event matching can migrate to GitHub Actions on Latchkey.

Verify it actually works

Bitbucket validates bitbucket-pipelines.yml on push, and a schema error disables the pipeline rather than failing a build, which can look like nothing happened at all.

# validate before pushing
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/x-yaml" \
  --data-binary @bitbucket-pipelines.yml \
  https://api.bitbucket.org/2.0/repositories/<workspace>/<repo>/pipelines/validate

# confirm which pipeline definition matched
# Pipelines -> the run -> "Configuration" tab

Constraints that catch people out

• Each step runs in a fresh container. Nothing persists between steps unless it is declared as an artifact or a cache.
• The default memory allocation per step is limited, and service containers share that budget, so adding a database service can push a previously passing build into an out-of-memory failure.
• Only branches with a matching branches: definition run; a push to an unmatched branch silently runs nothing.
• Artifacts are passed forward only to later steps in the same pipeline, not between pipelines.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• GitHub Actions documentation