Even though I don’t have years of professional programming experience, there has been a number of times where a bug is reported on my application and I cannot find out what change introduced it. This ends up being extremely frustrating and hard to work around. Once I discovered git bisect, I never experienced this frustration again.

Git Bisect

Git Bisect’s documentation has a great description:

“This command uses a binary search algorithm to find which commit in your project’s history introduced a bug. You use it by first telling it a “bad” commit that is known to contain the bug, and a “good” commit that is known to be before the bug was introduced. Then git bisect picks a commit between those two endpoints and asks you whether the selected commit is “good” or “bad”. It continues narrowing down the range until it finds the exact commit that introduced the change.”

As it says,

git bisectallows you to find which commit in your repository introduces a bug, or really any difference, such as the commit where performance increased, a specific wording was changed, or even a color change.

This is especially useful in large projects with tens or hundreds of commits a day. Finding the specific commit where a bug was introduced can make fixing it increasingly simpler. Understanding the changes that caused the issue makes it easier to solve it.

#git #github #bugs #tutorial #bug-fixing #coding