Photo by Lucas Gallone on Unsplash

Coming back from the holiday, I found myself tracking down a UI bug that I personally had no context of when the bug was introduced. I was stuck. Finding the bad commit was like finding a needle in a haystack. Determined to find the root cause of the issue, I turned to an essential tool in my tool box, git bisect.

Git bisect is a command that uses a binary search algorithm for finding a commit of interest in your project’s history. Two commits are required for the command to start: a “bad” commit that contains the bug, and a “good” commit that does not have the bug. Next, the command will traverse the commits between those two commits, each time prompting you if the commit is “good” or “bad”. After a series of prompts, it should provide you the commit that introduced the bug.

Identifying a good commit could be difficult. I tend to select a commit in history a few weeks or months at a time. For this particular scenario, a commit a few weeks ago sufficed.

$> git bisect start
$> git bisect bad c0fdabe  # A bad commit hash
$> git bisect good 38ccb50 # A good commit hash

The command will now checkout a commit between the two commits provided. The output would look something like this:

Bisecting: 9 revisions left to test after this (roughly 3 steps)

This is time for test whether the bug is present. If the commit is good, type:

git bisect good

If the commit is bad, type:

git bisect bad

After a few more iterations, the problematic commit was discovered. I was able to notify the author of the bug, thus the issue resolve promptly.