How can i view all comments posted by users in bitbucket repository

Question

In the repository home page , i can see comments posted in recent activity at the bottom, bit it only shows 10 commnets.

i want to all the comments posted since beginning.

Is there any way

Moorfowl

Answer 1

Comments of pull requests, issues and commits can be retrieved using bitbucket’s REST API.

However it seems that there is no way to list all of them at one place, so the only way to get them would be to query the API for each PR, issue or commit of the repository.

Note that this takes a long time, since bitbucket has seemingly set a limit to the number of accesses via API to repository data: I got Rate limit for this resource has been exceeded errors after retrieving around a thousand results, then I could retrieve about only one entry per second elapsed from the time of the last rate limit error.

Finding the API URL to the repository

The first step is to find the URL to the repo. For private repositories, it is necessary to get authenticated by providing username and password (using curl’s -u switch). The URL is of the form:

https://api.bitbucket.org/2.0/repositories/{repoOwnerName}/{repoName}

Running git remote -v from the local git repository should provide the missing values. Check the forged URL (below referred to as $url) by verifying that repository information is correctly retrieved as JSON data from it: curl -u username $url.

Fetching comments of commits

Comments of a commit can be accessed at $url/commit/{commitHash}/comments.

The resulting JSON data can be processed by a script. Beware that the results are paginated.

Below I simply extract the number of comments per commit. It is indicated by the value of the member size of the retrieved JSON object; I also request a partial response by adding the GET parameter fields=size.

My script getNComments.sh:

#!/bin/sh

pw=$1
id=$2

json=$(curl -s -u username:"$pw" \
    https://api.bitbucket.org/2.0/repositories/{repoOwnerName}/{repoName}/commit/$id/comments'?fields=size')

printf '%s' "$json" | grep -q '"type": "error"' \
    && printf "ERROR $id\n" && exit 0

nComments=$(printf '%s' "$json" | grep -o '"size": [0-9]*' | cut -d' ' -f2)
: ${nComments:=EMPTY}

checkNumeric=$(printf '%s' "$nComments" | tr -dc 0-9)
[ "$nComments" != "$checkNumeric" ] \
    && printf >&2 "!ERROR! $id:\n%s\n" "$json" && exit 1

printf "$nComments $id\n"

To use it, taking into account the possibility for the error mentioned above:

A) Prepare input data. From the local repository, generate the list of commits as wanted (run git fetch -a prior to update the local git repo if needed); check out git help rev-list for how it can be customised.

git rev-list --all | sort > sorted-all.id
cp sorted-all.id remaining.id

B) Run the script. Note that the password is passed here as a parameter – so first assign it to a variable safely using stty -echo; IFS= read -r passwd; stty echo, in one line; also see security considerations below. The processing is parallelised onto 15 processes here, using the option -P.

< remaining.id xargs -P 15 -L 1 ./getNComments.sh "$passwd" > commits.temp

C) When the rate limit is reached, that is when getNComments.sh prints !ERROR!, then kill the above command (Ctrl-C), and execute these below to update the input and output files. Wait a while for the request limit to increase, then re-execute the above one command and repeat until all the data is processed (that is when wc -l remaining.id returns 0).

cat commits.temp >> commits.result
cut -d' ' -f2 commits.result | sort | comm -13 - sorted-all.id > remaining.id

D) Finally, you can get the commits which received comments with:

grep '^[1-9]' commits.result

Fetching comments of pull requests and issues

The procedure is the same as for fetching commits’ comments, but for the following two adjustments:

1. Edit the script to replace in the URL commit by pullrequests or by issues, as appropriate;

2. Let $n be the number of issues/PRs to search. The git rev-list command above becomes: seq 1 $n > sorted-all.id

The total number of PRs in the repository can be obtained with:

curl -su username $url/pullrequests'?state=&fields=size'

and, if the issue tracker is set up, the number of issues with:

curl -su username $url/issues'?fields=size'

Hopefully, the repository has few enough PRs and issues so that all data can be fetched in one go.

Viewing comments

They can be viewed normally via the web interface on their commit/PR/issue page at:

https://bitbucket.org/{repoOwnerName}/{repoName}/commits/{commitHash}
https://bitbucket.org/{repoOwnerName}/{repoName}/pull-requests/{prId}
https://bitbucket.org/{repoOwnerName}/{repoName}/issues/{issueId}

For example, to open all PRs with comments in firefox:

awk '/^[1-9]/{print "https://bitbucket.org/{repoOwnerName}/{repoName}/pull-requests/"$2}' PRs.result | xargs firefox

---

Security considerations

Arguments passed on the command line are visible to all users of the system, via ps ax (or /proc/$PID/cmdline). Therefore the bitbucket password will be exposed, which could be a concern if the system is shared by multiple users. There are three commands getting the password from the command line: xargs, the script, and curl.

It appears that curl tries to hide the password by overwriting its memory, but it is not guaranteed to work, and even if it does, it leaves it visible for a (very short) time after the process starts. On my system, the parameters to curl are not hidden.

A better option could be to pass the sensitive information through environment variables. They should be visible only to the current user and root via ps axe (or /proc/$PID/environ); although it seems that there are systems that let all users access this information (do a ls -l /proc/*/environ to check the environment files’ permissions).

In the script simply replace the lines pw=$1 id=$2 with id=$1, then pass pw="$passwd" before xargs in the command line invocation. It will make the environment variable pw visible to xargs and all of its descendent processes, that is the script and its children (curl, grep, cut, etc), which may or may not read the variable. curl does not read the password from the environment, but if its password hiding trick mentioned above works then it might be good enough.

There are ways to avoid passing the password to curl via the command line, notably via standard input using the option -K -. In the script, replace curl -s -u username:"$pw" with printf -- '-s\n-u "%s"\n' "$authinfo" | curl -K - and define the variable authinfo to contain the data in the format username:password. Note that this method needs printf to be a shell built-in to be safe (check with type printf), otherwise the password will show up in its process arguments. If it is not a built-in, try with print or echo instead.

A simple alternative to an environment variable that will not appear in ps output in any case is via a file. Create a file with read/write permissions restricted to the current user (chmod 600), and edit it so that it contains username:password as its first line. In the script, replace pw=$1 with IFS= read -r authinfo < "$1", and edit it to use curl’s -K option as in the paragraph above. In the command line invocation replace $passwd with the filename.

The file approach has the drawback that the password will be written to disk (note that files in /proc are not on the disk). If this too is undesirable, it is possible to pass a named pipe instead of a regular file:

mkfifo pipe
chmod 600 pipe
# make sure printf is a builtin, or use an equivalent instead
(while :; do printf -- '%s\n' "username:$passwd"; done) > pipe&
pid=$!
exec 3<pipe

Then invoke the script passing pipe instead of the file. Finally, to clean up do:

kill $pid
exec 3<&-

This will ensure the authentication info is passed directly from the shell to the script (through the kernel), is not written to disk and is not exposed to other users via ps.

Vesperal

the key part is adding path param, which is not really working for me, even the comments was left for a file in the root folder like README.md – Indulgent

The path of the file for each inline comment is returned in the JSON response. If you are only interested in these you can specify the GET parameter fields=values.inline.path in the URL. However, the bitbucket API is paginated: by default only 10 values are returned, and a URL to the next chunk of results is provided. So in order to get all entries, one must follow the URL of the next member until it is missing from the returned object. This could be why you could not retrieve all of the comments. – Vesperal

The number of values returned by page can be set up to 100 with the GET parameter pagelen=100. – Vesperal

Answer 2

You can go to Commits and see the top line for each commit, you will need to click on each one to see further information.

If I find a way to see all without drilling into each commit, I will update this answer.

Garbe

Still works in 2020. Thank you, even if seems obvious I did not think about the "Comments" icon next to commits. The old "Recent Comments" sidebar on the user frontpage would have helped, but is a deprecated feature. – Southeastwards

Still works in 2020. Thank you, even if seems obvious I did not think about the "Comments" icon next to commits. (The old "Recent Comments" sidebar on the user frontpage would have helped, but is a deprecated feature, used to show all comments you yourself wrote. What happened to text processors (where people would write their own comments)? We should not have to hunt around for our own speech.) – Southeastwards

Answer 3

If you are looking for Old comments on a repository from bitbucket, you can check out the Activity Tab on the right hand side which will give you all the activity including comments that have happened on the PR/repo....

Dutybound