Git is being used primarily for version control but it also provides some generic tools for debugging. In this article, we will
explore how git bisect can help us firstly spot a commit that introduced a but in our codebase and secondly track it throughout
it’s lifespan.
What is git bisect
From the official docs:
The bisect command does a binary search through your commit history to help you identify as quickly as possible which commit
introduced an issue.
Read more at https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Debugging-with-Git.
The gist is that git bisect provides feedback about where and when the bug was introduced.
Example
First of all, we start by running:
$ git bisect start
A binary search is being initialized and we have to answer yes or no, which usually means answer whether the commit
was error free or not.
We do this by marking commits as bad or good:
$ git bisect bad $ git bisect good
We also get some feedback along the way:
# => Bisecting: 6 revisions left to test after this
When we are done with our research we can easily get back to a working state:
$ git bisect reset