Problem

While creating a repository or a project in Bitbucket Data Center, the action fails with the following or a similar message: 

XSRF Security Token Missing

Bitbucket Server could not complete this action due to a missing or expired form token.

You may have cleared your browser cookies, which could have resulted in the expiry of your current form token. 
A new form token has been issued.

The original input has been captured and you can retry the operation.

Any file attachments in the original input will be lost

Other actions may fail with this or a similar message as well.

Causes

There are several possible root causes of this problem. Use the list below to identify which one is applicable to your situation and then refer to the relevant solution from the Resolution section below.

Cause 1

You are using a reverse proxy server or load balancer in front of Bitbucket Data Center, and haven't added the required configuration parameters to bitbucket.properties 

Cause 2

You are using a reverse proxy server in front of Bitbucket Data Center that is using HTTP Basic Authentication (mod_auth_basic).

Bitbucket Data Center explicitly invalidates the HTTP session at the end of every request which uses basic authentication for scalability to avoid Tomcat holding a possibly large amount of sessions that were created having serving only one request. As a result, anything which relies on sessions to work (e.g. XSRF protection) will no longer work.

Cause 3

The Tomcat connector is insecure but the configuration contains the secure  attribute.

Cause 4

You are running multiple Atlassian products at the same base URL, with the only difference being the port number of each application. For instance Bitbucket Data Center is reachable via http://server.domain.com:7990 and Jira is reachable via http://server.domain.com:8080

Java web applications identify your session by setting a cookie in your browser. This cookie is bound to the hostname and path that each application is deployed to, but ignores the port. Applications that reside at URLs where only the port is different may unintentionally overwrite each other's session information, resulting in lost sessions.

Cause 5

You are running Bitbucket Data Center behind a load balancer that is not configured to use sticky sessions.

Cause 6

You have configured Bitbucket Data Center to use SSL, but are not redirecting HTTP requests to HTTPS.

Cause 7

You upgraded from Bitbucket Data Center version 4 or earlier to version 5 or newer and have carried over the jvmRoute  property from server.xml in the previous version.

Resolution

Please refer to the possible causes above and identify the relevant solution below:

Solution for Cause 1

To resolve the problem, several parameters need to be added to the  <BitbucketHome>/shared/bitbucket.properties, depending on the base URL that you have configured for Bitbucket Data Center.

• If your base URL is a "standard" port-less URL using the insecure HTTP protocol (such as http://bitbucket.domain.com/), add the following properties, where <fqdn>  is the fully-qualified domain name from the base URL (bitbucket.domain.com in this example):

  server.secure=false
  server.scheme=http
  server.proxy-port=80
  server.proxy-name=<fqdn>

• If your base URL is a URL that includes a port and is using the insecure HTTP protocol (such as http://bitbucket.domain.com:8080/), add the following properties, where <fqdn>  is the fully-qualified domain name from the base URL (bitbucket.domain.com in this example) and <port>  is the port:

  server.secure=false
  server.scheme=http
  server.proxy-port=<port>
  server.proxy-name=<fqdn>

• If your base URL is a "standard" port-less URL using the secure HTTPS protocol (such as https://bitbucket.domain.com/), add the following properties, where <fqdn>  is the fully-qualified domain name from the base URL (bitbucket.domain.com in this example):

  server.secure=true
  server.scheme=https
  server.proxy-port=443
  server.proxy-name=<fqdn>

• If your base URL is a URL that includes a port and is using the secure HTTPS protocol (such as https://bitbucket.domain.com:444/), add the following properties, where <fqdn>  is the fully-qualified domain name from the base URL (bitbucket.domain.com in this example) and <port> is the port:

  server.secure=true
  server.scheme=https
  server.proxy-port=<port>
  server.proxy-name=<fqdn>

Once you are done, restart Bitbucket Data Center (all nodes).

Solution for Cause 2

Disable the HTTP Basic Authentication within the proxy settings.

Related issue:  BSERV-4667 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Solution for Cause 3

1. For Bitbucket Data Center 5.0+
   • Remove the server.secure=true attribute from $BITBUCKET_HOME/shared/bitbucket.properties
2. For Bitbucket Data Center 4.x and below
   • Remove the secure="true" attribute and value from: $BITBUCKET_HOME/shared/server.xml 
3. Restart Bitbucket Data Center (all nodes).

Solution for Cause 4

Add a context path for Bitbucket Data Center. Please see Change Bitbucket's context path.

Solution for Cause 5

Enable sticky sessions (also known as session affinity) on the load balancer.

Solution for Cause 6

Follow the instructions at Redirect HTTP Requests to HTTPS to redirect requests from HTTP to HTTPS.

Solution for Cause 7

Add the following to the JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS environment variable in the <BitbucketInstallation>/bin/_start-webapp.sh file for each node

JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS="-DjvmRoute=<NAME OF NODE AS SET BY -Dcluster.node.name PROPERTY>