How can I tell if a given git tag is annotated or lightweight?
git for-each-ref
tells you what each ref is to by default, its id and its type. To restrict it to just tags, do git for-each-ref refs/tags
.
[T]he output has three fields: The hash of an object, the type of the object, and the name in refs/tags that refers to the object. A so-called "lightweight" tag is a name in refs/tags that refers to a
commit
¹ object. An "annotated" tag is a name in refs/tags that refers to atag
object.- Solomon Slow (in the comments)
Here is an example:
$ git for-each-ref refs/tags
902fa933e4a9d018574cbb7b5783a130338b47b8 commit refs/tags/v1.0-light
1f486472ccac3250c19235d843d196a3a7fbd78b tag refs/tags/v1.1-annot
fd3cf147ac6b0bb9da13ae2fb2b73122b919a036 commit refs/tags/v1.2-light
To do this for just one ref, you can use git cat-file
-t
on the local ref, to continue the example:
$ git cat-file -t v1.0-light
commit
$ git cat-file -t v1.1-annot
tag
¹ tags can refer to any Git object, if you want a buddy to fetch just one file and your repo's got a git server, you can git tag forsam :that.file
and Sam can fetch it and show it. Most of the convenience commands don't know what to do with tagged blobs or trees, but the core commands like update-index and such do
The git show-ref -d --tags
command sort of does it, since lightweight tags occur once in the output, and annotated tags occur twice. Also, only annotated tags include the "^{}" dereference operator in the output.
588e9261795ec6dda4bd0a881cf1a86848e3d975 refs/tags/1.2.3
7fe2caaed1b02bb6dae0305c5c0f2592e7080a7a refs/tags/1.2.4
588e9261795ec6dda4bd0a881cf1a86848e3d975 refs/tags/1.2.4^{}
And that output can than be massaged with the unix sort, sed, cut, and uniq commands to make the output more readable:
git show-ref -d --tags |
cut -b 42- | # to remove the commit-id
sort |
sed 's/\^{}//' | # remove ^{} markings
uniq -c | # count identical lines
sed 's/2\ refs\/tags\// a /' | # 2 identicals = annotated
sed 's/1\ refs\/tags\//lw /'
For my original repo (from my question) it outputs this:
lw 1.2.3
a 1.2.4
(e.g., 1.2.3 was "lightweight" and "1.2.4" was annotated).