Not everyone tags or uses it. But I reckon it is useful to manage your software versions and to give a visual indicator of what is in a version.

It’s important enough to have its own topic.

Create a tag

git tag -a <tagname> -m '<somedescriptiontext>'
git push --follow-tags

Tags aren’t automatically moved to remote so we’ll have to push it.

To tag a previous commit just add the commit hash at the end.

List tags

git tag -l

List tags and its commit hash

git show-ref --dereference --tags

For some reason the correct hash of the commit that was tagged would show the ref with prepend ^{}. for example:

7ab7471fa87f4618fb9f9018220202f06e3731b0 refs/tags/0.1
c382b7babd1d920e9254b326a5d8420f69603fc2 refs/tags/0.1^{} <-- This is the actual commit tagged
a634a7bd39270b40fdef59ed6f8f009f8aa02ffb refs/tags/1.0
1efaa11c068a79dab1b0f0b27e67aa814559c9b7 refs/tags/1.0^{} <-- As well as this

Show tag information, commits, description, etc

git show <tagname>

Checkout to a tag

You can’t really check out a tag in Git, since they can’t be moved around.

If you want to put a version of your repository in your working directory, you’ll need to create a new branch

git checkout -b <branch> <tagname>