JIYIK CN >

Git is one of the top version control systems used by teams around the world. Like other version control systems, Git also allows you to mark certain points in your repository's history as important.

Typically, developers use this to mark release points or to create tags so that they have a reference point in development for tagging purposes.

This article will discuss the basics of Git tags and how we can easily create Git tags and checkout Git tags using various commands. We can easily know 标签the meaning of the term.

A tag can be interpreted as a label used to discover a specific commit or some work in the push history. We can use it to mark a release point (for example, v58.0).

A tag is like a branch in a specific repository, but it cannot be changed. It specifies a specific commit in history and cannot be replaced unless it is updated exactly.

After tags are created, they have no further commit history. It is Headcreated on the commit that is referring to.

When you need to add a tag to remember later about a release or any particular commit, you can add a tag in that commit to easily remember later.

Creating tags in Git

To create a new tag, we will execute the following command.

$ git tag <tag_name>

There are two different kinds of labels: annotative labels and lightweight labels. The last mentioned command example creates a lightweight label.

The difference between the two tags is that when we use annotated tags, we can add some new additional metadata information, just like we did before in commits, such as email address, release date, comments related to the release notes, and signature of the person who created the release in the team, which is very important for public releases from the team.

While they 轻量级标签can be thought of as commits in a specific repository 书签, they represent names and pointers to commits.

In fact, Annotated tagsshould be used publicas instead Lightweight tags. privateThe command listed below will create a new Annotated tagfor future use v1.0version tags.

git tag -a v1.0

Switch to a Git tag

In order to checkout a Git tag, we will use the following command git checkout, in which we have to specify the tag name and the branch that has to be checked out to save in the local branch.

$ git checkout tags/<tag> -b <branch>

For this, we should get the latest list of tags from the remote repository. We will run the command with the options -alland mentioned below to fetch tags from our remote repository.-tagsgit fetch

$ git fetch --all --tags

Assuming that we have named a tag v1.0, we have to releasecheck it out in a branch called . We have to run the following command for the above purpose to get the desired result.

$ git checkout tags/v1.0 -b v1.0-branch

Now we have successfully checked out v1.0the tag.

Furthermore, we can git logcheck the status of the branch with the help of command.

But for using this command, we should make sure that the HEAD pointer points to the current annotated tag in the current branch of the repository.

$ git log --oneline --graph

Switch to the latest tag in Git using the tag name

Suppose we want to check out the latest Git tag using the topmost tag of our repository. In this case, we have to update our repository by fetching the remote tags available in our current repository.

$ git fetch --tags

We have already fetched several tags from the remote repository to the local repository using the above commands. Then we will fetch git describethe most recent tag which can be accessed using the command as explained below.

$ tag=$(git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`)

$ echo $tag
v2.0

Finally, we will git checkoutcheck it out using the command.

$ git checkout $tag -b latest

We have successfully switched to the latest Git tag available in the new branch using the above command in Git.