TIL: Git Annotated Tags
I've previously only ever used git's regular lightweight tags, created with
git tag TAGNAME.
Today I learned about annotated tags, created with git tag -a -m "MESSAGE"
TAGNAME. If you don't specify -m MESSAGE, git annoyingly prompts you for
one, but it will accept -m "".
Annotated tags store the creator, created timestamp, and the message. This might occasionally be useful for understanding what happened. A release tagged this way shows us who created the release, and when, which might differ from when the commit was created.
But more importantly is the different handling of lightweight versus annotated tags when pushing to the server.
Habitually, I've been using git push --tags. But this is slightly broken, in
that it pushes all tags. Some tags might be intended as my private local
development state. Some of them might be unreachable in the origin repo.
To address these issues, newer versions of git push introduced
--follow-tags, which only pushes annotated tags which are on ancestors
of the commit being pushed, so that no unreachable tags are created on origin.
Hence, a better workflow is:
- Use regular lightweight tags for local state.
Keep them private by never using
git push --tags. - Use annotated tags to share state with other developers.
- To share annotated tags, either push them directly, with
git push TAGNAME, or usegit push --follow-tags.