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Bulk reviewer assignment

The Scripting guide covers batch approval, but assigning reviewers across many PRs in one pass is a separate workflow. This recipe handles team rotations, onboarding new reviewers, and enforcing minimum reviewer coverage on existing PRs.

Recipe: assign a fixed reviewer list

Section titled “Recipe: assign a fixed reviewer list”

The script below adds every username in REVIEWERS to every open PR in WORKSPACE/REPO. Existing reviewers are not removed; if a reviewer is already assigned, bb pr reviewers add is a no-op.

bulk-assign-reviewers.sh
#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail


WORKSPACE="${WORKSPACE:-myworkspace}"
REPO="${REPO:-myrepo}"
# Space-separated usernames (Bitbucket handles, not display names)
REVIEWERS="${REVIEWERS:-alice bob charlie}"


# Optional: skip PRs authored by a reviewer (you can't review your own PR)
SKIP_SELF_REVIEW="${SKIP_SELF_REVIEW:-true}"


open_prs=$(bb pr list -w "$WORKSPACE" -r "$REPO" --json \
  --jq '.pullRequests[] | "\(.id)\t\(.author.nickname // .author.display_name)"')


while IFS=$'\t' read -r pr_id author; do
  [ -n "$pr_id" ] || continue
  echo "PR #$pr_id (by $author)"


  for reviewer in $REVIEWERS; do
    if [ "$SKIP_SELF_REVIEW" = "true" ] && [ "$reviewer" = "$author" ]; then
      echo "  - skip $reviewer (PR author)"
      continue
    fi


    if bb pr reviewers add "$pr_id" "$reviewer" \
         -w "$WORKSPACE" -r "$REPO" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
      echo "  + added $reviewer"
    else
      echo "  ! failed to add $reviewer (user not found, or perms)" >&2
    fi


    sleep 1   # rate-limit cushion
  done
done <<< "$open_prs"

Usage

Section titled “Usage”
Terminal window
WORKSPACE=myworkspace REPO=myrepo \
  REVIEWERS="alice bob charlie" \
  ./bulk-assign-reviewers.sh

Recipe: rotation by hash bucket

Section titled “Recipe: rotation by hash bucket”

If you want each PR to get one reviewer from a pool — for a round-robin team rotation — hash the PR ID into the reviewer list. This produces a stable, reproducible assignment without a database.

rotation-assign.sh
#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail


WORKSPACE="${WORKSPACE:-myworkspace}"
REPO="${REPO:-myrepo}"
POOL=(alice bob charlie dana)


open_prs=$(bb pr list -w "$WORKSPACE" -r "$REPO" --json --jq '.pullRequests[].id')


for pr_id in $open_prs; do
  idx=$(( pr_id % ${#POOL[@]} ))
  reviewer="${POOL[$idx]}"
  echo "PR #$pr_id -> $reviewer"
  bb pr reviewers add "$pr_id" "$reviewer" -w "$WORKSPACE" -r "$REPO" || true
  sleep 1
done

Handling rate limits

Section titled “Handling rate limits”

The CLI already retries 429 responses up to 3 times automatically. For very large bulk operations (hundreds of PRs × multiple reviewers), prefer:

  1. A larger sleep between PRs (sleep 2 or sleep 3).
  2. Splitting the run across cron windows.
  3. Wrapping individual bb calls in the retry wrapper for the rare case of persistent 429s.
Section titled “Related”