Change author to merge commit to person who merged
Asked by Lokesh:

I have been struggling a bit with merging PR here. In GitHub when you are about to merge a PR, you can choose which email Id you want as author of merge commit but in Bitbucket the person who raised the PR is the default author of merge commit.

Is there a way to change the default author of merge commit to the person who merged the PR instead of who raised it?


Answers:
author: Caroline R
body: Hi, [@Lokesh](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4567375)! Welcome to the community!

Indeed, the author of the merge commit will be the user who created the Pull Request, as this person is considered the author of the work that is being merged on the PR.

So, for this reason, when the PR is merged, that same user who authored the work will be shown as the Author.

However, we understand that it's important to see who merged the PR, so we have added in Bitbucket UI who the author of the work is and, separately, who merged the PR, as you can see here:

![Screen Shot 2021-09-23 at 11.58.56 AM.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/161785iDC42B0ADE03D5100/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screen Shot 2021-09-23 at 11.58.56 AM.png")

So **Closed by** indicates who actually merged the changes.

I hope this helps, but do let me know if you have any questions.

Kind regards,  
Caroline

comments: author: Lokesh
body: Hi, [@Caroline R](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3934006) !

I know we can see the person who closed the PR but for my use-case I need to have the commit by the name of person who closed it. We use 3rd party plugins and for those plugins we only want to give access to reviewer and not to every team member.   

Is this configuration even in consideration?


author: Theodora Boudale
body: Hi Lokesh,

This is not possible to configure at the moment and it's not something we have under consideration.

However, I can create a feature request for our development team to consider, and I'd like to ask for some more info on your use case to better understand why this is needed.

You mention 3rd party plugins and reviewers, and I'm not sure how this related to the author of the merge commit.

Could you please explain how these are related?  
And also what would be the benefit of having the user that does the PR merge as the commit author?

Kind regards,  
Theodora


author: Go 2 Evolution
body: When I look at the git history, I want to know **who** **wrote** the code. So when I change something or when I have questions, why this has been solved like this, I want to contact the actual **author**.

GitLab does this right in my opinion, but Bitbucket chooses this strange way which completely confuses me and my colleagues!


author: Theodora Boudale
body: Hi [@Go 2 Evolution](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5040490) and [@Lokesh](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4567375),

I went ahead and created a feature request about this in our issue tracker:

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-22294>

Please make sure to add your vote to that request (by selecting the **Vote for this issue** link) as the number of votes helps the development team and product managers better understand the demand for new features. You are more than welcome to leave any feedback, and you can also add yourself as a watcher (by selecting the **Start watching this issue** link) if you'd like to get notified via email on updates.

Implementation of new features is done as per our policy here <https://confluence.atlassian.com/support/implementation-of-new-features-policy-201294576.html> and any updates will be posted in the feature request.

Kind regards,  
Theodora


Tags: bitbucket-cloud

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