Navigate component history

When you have created several component snapshots or versions, or you imported a component with an existing history, you may want to navigate the history of the component and see how it evolved.
Bit offers several tools for both viewing the history, understanding differences and even take your component back in time to a past version.

Bit keeps the component history as an attribute of each component. This provides some unique capabilities when using Bit in your codebase:

  • Independent view of the history of each component.
  • Bring the complete history of a component to other workspaces (when using bit import).
  • Checkout past versions of a component in a workspace.
  • Track new changes to the component history in any workspace.

This de-centralized approach to component history is a key feature of Bit and allows for more autonomy for developers.

Viewing the history for remote components

The scope-server allows complete autonomy for a viewer to explore past versions of a component. You may use the component changelog tab.


This tab shows you the complete history of a component with all log messages. Clicking on each version takes you back in time to that version. You can see the component's implementation, documentation, tests, configuration and rendering.
Another option is to use the version selector drop down:


You may also use your CLI to view the history of a remote component:

bit log teambit.community/ui/graph/bubble-graph --remote
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...

tag 1.9.56 (02a9b0f888b63fab5fc317e6509ec70043cfaffe)
author: Acme Gene <you@domain.com>
date: 11/11/2021, 3:39:45 PM

      fix jest 2 (bump dependencies versions)

tag 1.9.57 (78048ebd380c7fc764a6a2e9e78e08ec22860fe3)
author: Acme Gene <you@domain.com>
date: 11/11/2021, 4:41:45 PM

      re tag all

tag 1.9.58 (81b84f42d10c17ae4b29293a8ca60dbf7fcfc11b)
author: Acme Gene <you@domain.com>
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Viewing the history for local components

follow along

To follow this section start a new project and import the bubble graph component.
All commands and examples will use it as a reference. If you have your own component with history, you may use it.

mkdir navigate-history && cd navigate-history
bit init
bit import teambit.community/ui/graph/bubble-graph
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Any component you import or create in the workspace will have all its history information available in the local dev server:

bit start
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You can run log to view the history as well:

bit log teambit.community/ui/graph/bubble-graph
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Checkout versions

To learn how to inspect the diffs between two snaps, and checkout a specific snap, see Updating components and merging changes.