Modern Git Commands and Features You Should Be Using
Modern Git Commands and Features You Should Be Using
<p> All of us - software engineers - use <code class="inline">git</code> every day, however most people only ever touch the most basic of commands, such as...
Git bisectIs goddamn amazing! I had a very large multi-branch project that somewhere somehow had some crashing bug. Instead of searching through 5 or so branches with 20 something large commits for each, I bisected like 7 times and it told me exactly where to bug was introduced.
Highly recommended
13Highly recommended
I agree. Once we get a hang of the value that bisect brings, one unintended consequence is that we start to value atomic commits a whole lot more. There is nothing more annoying than bisecting a bug and suddenly stumbling upon a commit that does it all: updates dependencies, touches everything under the sun, does cleanup commits for unrelated files, etc. Yuck.
8Exactly! My case was such a case actually. But it further shows that bisect is a great tool that benefits from good practice.
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I love
git bisectfor complex regressions! If I don't immediately know where a bug is, I write a regression test and then bisect to find where it was introduced. Knowing exactly where the bug was introduced and being able to look at the diff almost always speeds up finding the bug.5For those who don't know (I assume you do), you can
git bisect run some_commandand git will automatically run git bisect until it finds the falty commit. It's amazing.5
git worktreeI was not aware of. Very interesting!9It's so anoying that at $WORK we have multiple git repos with symbolic link that points above their respective .git to each other and need to be in sync. So of course
git workreeandgit bisectdon't work that well…2
I just took a stab at
git worktreeat work this week after rereading this article. It's amazing. We were in the process of upgrading our UI component library and I was able to checkout pre/post upgrade branches without having to continuouslynpm installto swap between dependencies.Plus I'm pretty sure I could have both "versions" of our repo locally running at the same time so I could do UI comparisons...but I didn't actually get that far.
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