How to create and use tags¶
Tags allow you to bookmark important points in your commit history.
You can use tags to identify milestones such as:
- Adding specific features to your model or data analysis (e.g.,
feature-age-dependent-mixing); - Completing objectives in your research plan (e.g.,
objective-1,objective-2); - Completed manuscript drafts (e.g.,
draft-1,draft-2); and - Manuscript submission and revisions (e.g.,
submitted,revision-1).
Tagging the current commit¶
You can add a tag (in this example, "my-tag") to the current commit by running:
git tag -a my-tag
This will open your chosen editor and ask you to write a description for this tag.
Pushing tags to a remote repository¶
By default, git push doesn't push tags to remote repositories.
Instead, you have to explicitly push tags.
You can push a tag (in this example, called "my-tag") to a remote repository (in this example, called "origin") by running:
git push origin my-tag
You can push all of your tags to a remote repository (in this example, called "origin") by running:
git push origin --tags
Tagging a past commit¶
To add a tag to a previous commit, you can identify the commit by its hash. For example, you can inspect your commit history by running:
git log --oneline --no-decorate
If your commit history looks like:
003cf6b Show how to ignore certain files
339eb5a Show how to prepare and record commits
6a7fb8b Show how to clone remote repositories
...
003cf6b ("Show how to ignore certain files"), you can tag the previous commit ("Show how to prepare and record commits") by running:
git tag -a my-tag 339eb5a
Listing tags¶
You can list all tags by running:
git tag
You can also list only tags that match a specific pattern (in this example, all tags beginning with "my") by running:
git tag --list 'my*'
Deleting tags¶
You can delete a tag by running:
git tag --delete my-tag
Creating a branch from a tag¶
You can check out a tag and begin working on a new branch by running:
git checkout -b my-branch my-tag