How to transfer all assets to a new account
Asked by Michael Glenn Williams:

Our company has rebranded and wants to transfer all our assets to the account for the new company domain. We were told to make a user in the old account an admin in the new account. We cannot find any way to do that. The opposite case seems to work, the new user was made an admin of the old account. However, now when the new user logs in, it only sees the old account info.

Edit: here is the previous advice:

<https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-questions/transfer-workspace-from-one-account-to-another/qaq-p/1390170#U1855792>

Edit done

Finally, the instructions simply say "use the new admin user to transfer the repos etc" but no instructions on how to do that tranfser.

There is also a note that some repos must be transferred by Customer Support so we created a case but have no response from Customer Support.


Answers:
author: Theodora Boudale
body: Hi [@Michael Glenn Williams](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2115389),

I think there is some confusion on how accounts and workspaces work in Bitbucket Cloud. Please allow me to share some info and address your question below:

In Bitbucket Cloud repositories are owned by workspaces and not by accounts. E.g. if a repo's url is <https://bitbucket.org/my-company/my-repo> then this repo is owned by the workspace <https://bitbucket.org/my-company>.

*my-company* in this example is the workspace id. If you want to change that to *my-company-new* , you can do that from the existing workspace's settings (<https://bitbucket.org/my-company/workspace/settings>) as long as this new workspace id is not used by anyone else.

If you want to simply change that, you don't need to create a new workspace and transfer repos there. In case you still want to transfer repos, you can find the documentation here (the support team does not transfer repository ownership):

* <https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/transfer-repository-ownership/>

Please note that if you either transfer repos or change the workspace-id of an existing workspace, the repo URLs will change, so you'll need to update your local clone of these repos with the new URL. You can find instructions for that in the documentation I linked above, section title "**Update local configuration files with the new repository URL**".

++Regarding accounts:++   
A workspace can have as administrators one or multiple Bitbucket Cloud accounts.  
One account cannot be an administrator of another account, they can be administrators of workspaces.

If you and/or your team members are going to have new company email addresses, you can change the email of your existing Bitbucket Cloud accounts to the new one, as long as:

1. The accounts are not managed. You can verify that by going to <https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/email>. If you have the option to change the email, this means the account is not managed, otherwise you will see a message saying the account is managed.
2. You haven't created a new Bitbucket Cloud account or Atlassian account with the same email. If you have created a new account already, you'll need to delete the newly created account first. It will take 14 days for the account to get deleted, and then you can make the email change.

If you have already created new Bitbucket accounts with emails from the new domain, a different option would be to add these new accounts to the existing workspace from the workspace's **Settings** , e.g. in   
<https://bitbucket.org/my-company/workspace/settings/groups>,  
you can add a new account in the **Administrators** user group. Then, log in to Bitbucket with the new email and remove the old account as admin.

However, in this case, any activity with the old account (commits, pulls requests, comments, etc) will still be associated with the old account. If you go with the first option I mentioned (changing emails to the existing account), there will be only one account and continuity in the activity of this account.

Finally, If the workspace you use has a license in <https://my.atlassian.com/> associated with the old email, you'll need to transfer the license to the new email. You do that by changing billing and technical contacts in <https://my.atlassian.com/> for the license, see in the link below the question "**How do I update the billing and technical contacts for my Atlassian products?**"

* <https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing#manage-account>

Please feel free to let me know if I have misunderstood something about your use case, if anything is unclear, and if you need any additional info/clarification in order to make a decision on how to proceed.

Kind regards,  
Theodora

comments: author: Michael Glenn Williams
body: Theodora,

The way that Atlassian has structured these relationships is not the way a business works. Instead, this structure is apparently to facilitate legacy implementations of Bitbucket .

The Bitbucket concept of "ownership of a repo" is not correct. Ownership refers to , well ownership! ... as in being able to sell, license, trade etc property such as repos. The relationship of a workspace to a repo as is described in this post has nothing to do with ownership. I would describe it as an administrative relationship. I would also describe the requirement of having an account name or company name in a URL as a totally inappropriate use of overloading a URL for a Bitbucket internal purpose.

If my company owns a repo and wants to transfer it to another company, we should be able to do that without needing to rename it or any other of the steps described above.


Tags: bitbucket-cloud

cloud