How do I create tag with certain commits and push it to origin?
Once you've created the tag (which it looks like you've done), simply run
git push --tags origin
Here is a concrete example:
git add .
git commit -m "some description"
git tag v0.1.9 # or any other text
git push origin master # push the commit
git push --tags origin # push the tags
This is what you want
git add .
git commit -m "commit10"
git tag -a v1.73.0 -m "Latest release (or some message)"
git push origin master
git push origin v1.73.
How tags work
In git, each tag is said to "point to" a (one, single) commit. In fact, the same is true of a branch: a branch name also just points to one commit.
What makes this work is two things:
- each commit also points to another commit (or perhaps several), and
- for branches (and only for branches), the commit to which the branch points "moves forward" automatically. That is, as you add new commits—in some ways, that's mostly all git does: add new commits to its collective, sort of like the Borg from the old Star Trek TNG series—whatever branch you're on, that's the branch that gets re-adjusted to point to the new commit.
Thus, the main difference between a branch and a tag is that a tag does not move.
To see how this works, consider a simple git repository with just three commits. Let's label these commits A
, B
, and C
. The first commit (A
) points to nothing, as it's the first commit, and branch master
points to A
:
A <-- master
When you make the second commit, git creates B
pointing back to A
, and advances the branch name to point to B
:
A <- B <-- master
Then when you make a third commit, git again makes it point back to its parent commit, and advances the branch:
A <- B <- C <-- master
If you make a tag now, that tag will, by default, point to commit C
:
A <- B <- C <-- master
^
|
tag: sometag
If you then make a new commit D
, git advances the branch, but not the tag:
A <- B <- C <- D <-- master
^
|
tag: sometag
You can, at any time, create or delete any tag pointing to any particular commit:
$ git tag -d sometag
will delete tag sometag
, after which:
$ git tag sometag master~2
will add sometag
pointing to commit B
.1
(We've just proven that a tag can move. The real difference is that tags are not expected to move, while branches are; and git won't move tags automatically.2 Branches are generally expected to move in a "forward" direction, i.e., if master
used to point to commit C
and now points to commit D
, commit C
should usually be found by starting at D
and working backwards. Any time you move a branch so that this rule is violated, you're "rewriting history"; see other articles for when this is fine, and when it causes people trouble.)
Pushing tags
When you use git push
, what you're really doing is instructing some other git repository to take any new commits you have that they don't, and then set some name(s)—usually branches and/or tags—to point to some commits (one each) in the resulting collection.3 These names (branches, tags, and so on) are called "references" in general, but let's just use "branch" and "tag" for now.
The argument after git push
names the repository (generally via a "remote" name, like origin
) to push-to. If you leave it out, git will try to figure one out, but if you want to add a branch or tag name, you need to include it explicitly, since the first word here is assumed to be the remote-name. (That is, git push master
tries to use master
as a remote-name rather than a branch-name.)
To push all your tags, you can simply add --tags
to your git push
command:
git push --tags origin
To push a specific tag, you can name it:
git push origin sometag
just as you can push a specific branch:
git push origin master
(In fact, that fourth argument is a pair of names, like master:master
or sometag:sometag
, but it defaults to using the same name on both sides in most cases.4)
You can leave out the name origin
if you don't need it to make all the arguments, e.g., git push --tags
is the same as git push --tags origin
(assuming all your pushes go to origin
, anyway).
Putting it together
To set a tag in the remote, first set it locally, with git tag name commit-identifier
. Use whatever viewer you like to make sure it's set correctly. Then push it, with either git push origin name
or git push --tags
.
1The master~2
syntax instructs git to start at the commit found via master
, then back up two steps. You could instead write the raw SHA-1 for commit B
here.
2Old versions of git (pre 1.8.4) accidentally applied branch rules to tags when pushing (on the remote side, i.e., they let a tag move if it was a "fast forward").
3In some cases, you can point a name to an "annotated tag", and there's nothing preventing a name from pointing at a "tree" or "blob" object either, but that's not a normal setup.
4Actually the default dst refspec for a branch is complicated: it depends on your push.default
configuration, and whether there is a remote.repository.push
setting, and whether there is an upstream configured, and so on. For tags, the rules are simpler since there's no such thing as an "upstream".