Debugging with git bisect

Via Sebastian Bergmann’s blog I’ve learned about git bisect and how it can used for debugging.  Sebastian demonstrates the functionality together with PHPUnit.  I am a git newbie, so that was quite interesting for me.

git bisect can be used to find the change that introduced a bug. It does so by performing a binary search on the list of commits between a known good and a known bad state of the repository. A tool such as PHPUnit can be invoked at each step of the binary search to check whether or not the current state is broken.

Here is a shortcut on how to actually use it:

$ git bisect start
$ git bisect good someVersion
$ git bisect bad someOtherVersion
$ git bisect run someCommand -with SomeArgument

There are, of course, more resources online covering the feature.  I found this section of the Git Community Book helpful.  Hopefully, I’ll remember about it when I actually need it.