Debugging Made Easy with Git Bisect
2 min readJan 5, 2023
What is Git Bisect?
Git bisect is a powerful tool that allows you to quickly find the commit that introduced a bug into your codebase. Long gone are the days of manually checking out each commit and testing it — git bisect
uses a binary search to pinpoint the exact commit where the bug was introduced in the least number of steps, saving you time in tracking down issues and bugs.
How does it work?
git bisect
works by:
- Asking you to identify the last known good commit (a commit that doesn’t contain the bug)
- Asking you to identify a bad commit (a commit that does contain the bug, usually the head of your
master
branch) - Repeatedly checking you out to a new commit, and asking you to test and identify if the commit is good or bad
Looking at the below diagram, at each stage, the algorithm uses a binary search to narrow down the culprit commit to either range A
or range B
, depending on if current commit
is good or bad: