Documentation

One of the popular favorites at thoughtbot, at least in the boost team, is git bisect. It helps you find when/where (in which commit) a certain part of the code broke.

It’s pretty magic and this is how you use it.

Start:

git bisect start

Git checkout the branch that you know is good, where the code is working and:

git bisect good

Git checkout the broken branch and set it as bad:

git bisect bad

This can be accomplished in various ways, say you know something is currently broken in main, you can declare it from a different branch:

git bisect bad main

Or you want to go back in time, so you can checkout the SHA of a commit that you know is bad, and maybe go 3 step back and use:

git bisect good HEAD~3

Then git starts doing its magic. Keep going, running git bisect good or bad in case you’re “going back or forth.”

At the end you’ll see what was the commit that broke the code. Yay.

To exit:

git bisect reset

In the docs there are a lot of additional nifty things you can do, but this is already cool basic usage that gets the job done.