Enforce use of Jira story references in commit or PR

[duncan.wraight]

Hi folks

We recently set up CircleCI's Jira notification tool. This allows us to track our CI/CD pipelines on each team's Jira Deployment page.

To facilitate this, we have to include a Jira story ID (e.g. "TO-128") in our PR titles or in a commit (merge commits excluded).

Is there anything BitBucket can do to enforce this? Either on commit messages - a Git hook for instance - or in PR titles?

Many thanks

[Theodora Boudale · Accepted solution]

Hi Duncan and welcome to the community.

It is possible to enforce this for commit messages (not for PRs I'm afraid).

If you have integrated your Bitbucket workspace with a JIRA instance, there will be a link for each workspace repo, which you can view from Repository settings > Links.

In the same page, there is an option Require issue keys in commit messages which you can enable for each repo. Is this something that works for you?

Kind regards,
Theodora

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@duncan.wraight 

You can achieve this using Better Commit Policy Connector for Bitbucket Cloud which integrates with Jira Cloud via Better Commit Policy for Jira Cloud (you need both apps)

It enforces rules directly in Bitbucket Cloud to:

• Require Jira work item keys in commit messages and/or pull request titles

• Validate the work item keys against Jira (e.g. only allow keys from active sprints or specific statuses)

• Block non-compliant commits or PR merges to keep your development process clean and audit-ready

This works alongside Bitbucket’s built-in branch restrictions and merge checks, adding another layer of control for compliance and CI/CD traceability.

Start a trial today (the Bitbucket Connector app is free)!

(I'm part of the Midori team, developing the Better Commit Policy apps.)