Tags are how git takes a photo of a commit and puts it on the wall. I created one the day a release shipped and never had to hunt for its hash again.
About 2 min of reading
Pin a human-readable name to a commit and share that pin with the remote. I tagged the day a release shipped so nobody ever had to hunt for its hash again.
Commit something and create an annotated tag on it. The tag name points at that exact commit and stores a message with it.
Before you run it, say out loud what it will print. Then open the answer.
Add a lightweight tag, which is just a name with no metadata. Both names now show in the list, each pointing at a commit.
Before you run it, say out loud what it will print. Then open the answer.
Push the tags to the remote. Tags are not sent by a normal push; you have to ask for them explicitly with --tags.
Before you run it, say out loud what it will print. Then open the answer.
Before you write anything, put these lines back in the right order. Click a line to move it up one step. This support step is easier than writing code from scratch, and it is here to make the last example stick.
Unlike a branch, a tag points at one commit forever:
git tag v1.0 <hash>That immovability is the whole point. A branch moves forward as you commit; a tag stays put so it always names the same snapshot. That is why releases can trust v1.0 to mean the same thing next year.
| Type | Stores metadata |
|---|---|
| Annotated | Yes, full message and tagger info |
| Lightweight | No, just a hash |
Annotated tags win for releases because they record who created them and why. A lightweight tag has its place for scratch marks you only use yourself.
git tag -a v1.0 -m "First release"An annotated tag pins a name to a specific commit and stores a message with it. After this, v1.0 is a permanent, human-sized handle for a commit that otherwise looks like a wall of hexadecimal. That is how you tell people which point in history you shipped.
git push origin --tagsTags are not sent with a normal push, git treats them as separate. --tags carries every tag to the remote so other people can find the release. Missing this once, and I spent minutes wondering why the team could not see the version I had just marked.
git tag v2.0 # lightweight pointer
git tag -a v3.0 -m "x" # annotated with metadataA lightweight tag is just a name pointing at a commit. An annotated tag stores the tagger's name, email, date, and message. For anything you share with the world, annotated is the better default because it carries the story of when and by whom it was marked.
Each one is defined here on this site. Open the entry for the full definition and the other words it points at.