Marking Releases With Git

Overview

Using the git tag command to mark releases.

Listing tags

• git tag lists existing tags
• git tag -l v1.8.* searches existing tags using a pattern

Annotated tags

• "Lightweight tags" are pointers to specific commits and don't do much else.
• "Annotated tags" are required to mark a version in the repo, and on GitHub.

$ git tag -a v1.4 -m "my version 1.4"
$ git tag
v0.1
v1.3
v1.4

• -a indicates an annotated tag
• -m is the message to store with the tag

git show v1.4 will display all the data associated with the tag

Tags can be added after the fact using the checksum of a commit, e.g. git tag -a v1.2 9fceb02

Pushing tags to GitHub

Tags are not automatically sent along when pushing a branch. For example they will not show up on GitHub until they are manually pushed, e.g. git push origin v1.4.