How To Checkout/Clone Git Tags

It’s a common DevOps practice to tag a specific commit id whenever there is a release. Also, developers tag specific commits for several uses cases.

When it comes to the application release process, whenever there is a hotfix, the fix starts from the commit id that was tagged for release.

In this blog, you will learn the follwing.

1. Checkout a particular git tag
2. git clone from a tag
3. merge a git tag to a branch

Checkout Git Tag

Let’s look at different options associated with checking out a git tag.

Checkout a Git Tag To Branch

Now that you know the list of available tags, you can check out a particular tag.

For example, if you want to checkout a tag v.1.0 to a branch named hotfix-1.0, you can do so using the following git command.

git checkout tags/v.1.0 -b hotfix-1.0

List Git Tags

When you clone a repository, all the tags associated with the repository will be pulled down.

To fetch all the remote tags, use the fetch command as shown below.

git fetch --tags

You can list down all the tags from the git repository using the following command.

git tag -l 

You can also search for tags with patterns.

git tag -l "v*"

To get the latest git tag, you can use the following command.

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

Get Git Tag Information

If you get the commit id and other information associated with a tag using the following command.

git show v.1.0

Clone from a git tag

Cloning a specific git tag is very useful for debugging and other purposes.

To clone a particular tag, you can use the clone command as shown below.

git clone -b <git-tagname> <repository-url> 

For example,

git clone -b v.1.0 

When you clone a tag, it will be in the detached HEAD state.

If you need to checkout to a new branch if you want to make changes to the tag as explained above.

Merge a git tag to a branch

Following command merges a particular tag to the current branch.

git merge tag_name

Let’s say you want to merge the latest tag to the current branch, you can use the following command.

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

If it a local branch, you can push the changes to the upstream branch.

Conclusion

Git tagging is very important when it comes to CI/CD pipeline.

Make sure you follow the right set of practices in git tagging and creating branches from git tags.