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When using Bitbucket for source control, there's an "Approve" button that appears at the upper right of the commit page:

Bitbucket Approve Button

It appears to generate an activity message in the repositories overview page:

enter image description here

Is that all it does? What is the intended purpose of that button? Is it just a social feature?

Simon East
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andrybak
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    After googling for 2 hours I found that those buttons were called "Like" before [Redesign](http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/10/09/introducing-the-redesigned-bitbucket/), and apparently they haven't changed description in some of their FAQs. – andrybak Oct 27 '12 at 21:07
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    Also these button before redesign: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/06/28/pull-request-and-changeset-likes/ and approve changeset works as well? – hellboy Oct 31 '13 at 16:21
  • @hellboy seems like that – andrybak Nov 02 '13 at 14:51
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    This answer has some related information: http://stackoverflow.com/a/14609526/749232 – saji89 Nov 12 '14 at 10:28
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    The quick answer is yes, it's just a social feature. However changeset approvals are also exposed by the API and could theoretically be used externally, e.g. to enforce that all commits must be approved before merging to master, or a variety of other things. – Dan Tao Sep 03 '15 at 15:49
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    This is the top result on Google for "bitbucket approve commit" and should be reopened or deleted. The comments have enough answer-type content that I am voting to reopen. – Air Apr 25 '16 at 16:10
  • Original question was about "bitbucket.org". However, people might find this question when looking for information about "Bitbucket server" from "Atlassian". And on "Bitbucket server" one can configure the pull-request workflow to _depend on the number of approvals from other users_. In addition to reopening this question I suggest broadening it to include both "bitbucket.org" and "Bitbucket server". – andrybak Apr 27 '16 at 11:47

2 Answers2

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One use case is when a pull request gets a certain number of approvals, then it gets merged, either automatically or manually.

Thus it becomes easy to filter all the pull requests which are ready to be merged.

It's quite a common feature in code review tools. I have found it to be almost identical in GitLab too.

shakhawat
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The question was about commits, not pull request. I just created a new pull request from an approved commit and there was no automatic approval on the pull request from the same reviewer who approved the commit. Social feature indeed.

user14941796
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    Welcome to Stack Overflow! Your post seems to be a basic description and commentary of the behavior you see when you click the Approve button, but it doesn't answer the question being asked or provide additional information discovered by your own research. Please see [How do I Write a Good Answer](https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-answer) for help writing constructive answers. – drmuelr Jan 05 '21 at 04:13