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Introduction

In the brave-core repo, there is a script you can use to find regressions on Desktop. It will fetch releases from our GitHub page and download/install them. Based on the user input (does this work?) a binary search is done to narrow down possible builds until the actual bad release is found. At that point, the commit log for that version is shown

Getting started

There's a Python 2 script available in brave-core which helps automate the tedious task of creating all the pull requests: ./script/build-bisect.py

In order to use this, you'll need to create a GitHub personal access token

  • visit https://github.com/settings/tokens
  • click Generate new token
  • set the scopes (if needed). If you're not sure what to do, you can always change them later
  • capture the token that is output
  • open your .npmrc (~/.npmrc) and add the token value (NOTE: if you do this and store your dotfiles publicly (on GitHub/GitLab/etc), you'll want to specifically add .npmrc to your .gitignore file) 
    BRAVE_GITHUB_TOKEN=0a0aaa00a0000aa0aaa0000000a0a0000a00aa0a

If you don't want to store this in your .npmrc, you can always set the environment variable or include the environment variable in the usage:

BRAVE_GITHUB_TOKEN=0a0aaa00a0000aa0aaa0000000a0a0000a00aa0a ./script/build-bisect.py --options-go-here

Example usage

Search all versions

  • With no parameters, all releases will be fetched ./script/build-bisect.py

Provide good/bad versions

  • If you know good and/or bad versions, you can provide those with the optional parameters: ./script/build-bisect.py --good=0.60.0 --bad=0.61.36

    For example, in the above- 0.60.0 isn't a real version, but it'll match the first 0.60.x release. This is intended to be a version where the feature WAS working. --good and --bad are both optional; if you only know one of them, that's OK!

Other flags

  • To get more info (debug logs), use the --verbose parameter
  • Restrict bisect to a particular channel with --channel. ex: --channel=dev, --channel=beta, --channel=release
  • If for some reason you wanted to use your actual profile directories (instead of the temp ones), you can use the --real-profile parameter
  • You can provide a zip file that will get downloaded for each version and unzipped into the temporary profile directory. For example, I have a 5000 bookmarks profile which you can use to seed your profile. You would enable this via the following command line argument: --use-profile="https://github.com/brave/qa-resources/blob/bsc-profile/profiles/5000-bookmarks.zip?raw=true"

Notes / Limitations

  • Temporary profile directories are created for each run. No need to worry about your real browser data being modified 😄
  • Only works for macOS at the moment (edits welcome for Windows and/or Linux)
  • Tool could also be used to find first appearance of a feature. However, it's confusing because it prompts you asking if build is broke or not. When using for this purpose, you would just answer y for versions that DON'T have the feature and n for versions that DO.

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