Tags

A very useful aspect of Git[1] is the ability to mark any commit[2] with additional information. This is called a “tag” and can be used as a form of marker.

Creating a tag is a simple CLI command:

git tag v0.9.0

This attached the tag to the last commit. This is important since the tag won't include any files that have changed but have not be committed. On a forge[3] this will show up on the tags page and commit graph.

As important note is that Git does not automatically push tags to the remote repository[4]. Instead, you need to push them separately.

git push --tags

Alternatively, you could create a Just[5] target to push both at the same time which would allow `just push` to do everything.

push:
    git push
    git push --tags

As a note, the tag names must be unique. So you can't have two `v0.0.1` tags.

Internals

Internally, a tag is just a pointer to a specific commit. Once set, it remains pointing to that specific commit but allows you to have a symbolic name, such as `v0.9.0`, instead of the internal identifier, such as `ad301ac018`.

Versioning

While versioning[6] is a more advanced topic, I found the most common use of a tag is identify the project at a certain point as a specific version.

Major Changes

Another use for tags is to identify when you started or stopped working on a major refactor. In this case, you could call `git tag before-chapter-10-rewrite`, do a bunch of commits and changes, and then end with a `git tag after-chapter-10 rewrite`. That way, you don't have to do everything in a single commit (“commit early and often”) but still know you were doing a major change.

This can also be done with a branch[7] but tags are considerably more lightweight and easier than branches, though branches are more flexible.

Readers and Editors

Another use of tags is the ability to identify when you gave a copy of the project to a reader. That way, you don't have to remember if you continued to edit the piece while they were reading (I've had readers take 2-3 months to finish).

These days, I use branches exclusively for this but I started with using tags.

git tag sent-to-bob

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