Eulo Labs
Back to Blog

Enhancing Your Bitbucket Workflow: Better Ways to View Data and Documentation

Learn how to improve collaboration in Bitbucket Cloud by enabling native-quality previews for non-code assets like CSVs, PDFs, and 3D models.

Originally posted in the Atlassian Community forums.

Bitbucket Cloud is an essential tool for source code management, but software projects often involve much more than just code. Repositories house a variety of non-code assets - data files, rich specifications, graphic designs, and rich markup (e.g., AsciiDoc or RDoc).

Traditionally, viewing these files in a browser-based Git host has been a challenge. Often, the interface defaults to raw text views or requires users to download the file to view it in an external application. This context-switching can disrupt the flow of code reviews and project management.

Improving Support for Non-Code Assets

By enhancing the file viewing experience directly within Bitbucket, teams can:

  • Reduce Context Switching: Stay within the pull request or file browser.
  • Improve Peer Reviews: Review data and documentation changes with the same rigour as code.
  • Democratize Access: Enable non-developers (like PMs or Designers) to view project assets without needing local dev environments.

Extending Bitbucket with Atlassian Forge

The Atlassian Forge platform provides a secure and powerful way to extend the Bitbucket UI and recently introduced the bitbucket:repoCodeFileViewer module, which allows you to render files in the Bitbucket file browser.

One of the significant advantages of the Atlassian Forge approach is security. Apps built on the "Runs on Atlassian" (Forge) architecture ensure that:

  • Your data processed for rendering remains within the secure Atlassian environment or your browser.
  • Sensitive source code is not transmitted to third-party servers.
  • The extension integrates seamlessly with the existing Bitbucket permissions and UI.

Newly Supported File Types

Our new File Renderers for Bitbucket app supports the following file types:

  • CSV
  • TSV
  • PDF
  • STL
  • AsciiDoc

with more arriving soon:

  • Mapping with GeoJSON, KML and TopoJSON
  • Creole
  • RDoc

Give it a try via the installation link and check out the docs. Let us know what other file types you'd like supported for your work environment.

NOTE: Forge Bitbucket apps cannot yet be published to the Atlassian Marketplace, and so distribution is by installation link only.