How can I get the latest tag name in current branch in Git?

Question

What's the simplest way to get the most recent tag in Git?

git tag a HEAD
git tag b HEAD^^
git tag c HEAD^
git tag

output:

a
b
c

Should I write a script to get each tag's datetime and compare them?

Answer 1

In addition to all above answers, you could also add the branch that you want to get the tags from and also a matcher to search for specific tags names.

git describe --tags --abbrev=0 --match=*build-* # search for tags with build as prefix

#With branch name
git describe main --tags --abbrev=0 --match=*build-* # search for tags with build as prefix

Answer 2

When trying to solve this in my team, when we had several tags on the HEAD of our main branch (used to get the release version of our product, we just did a simple:

git tag -l --contains HEAD | tail -n1

To avoid extra tags that may be introduced by CI/CD during release, it's easy to add a grep before the tail, but this retrieves the last tag added to the commit on top of the current branch.

Answer 3

Below is the command that seems to work to achieve the recently tag created from the current commit (not comfortable yet with the glob pattern):

git describe --tags --match '*.*.*' --match '*.*.*-*' --match '*.*.*-rc.*' --first-parent --abbrev=0

Answer 4

If you need a one liner which gets the latest tag name (by tag date) on the current branch:

git for-each-ref refs/tags --sort=-taggerdate --format="%(refname:short)" --count=1 --points-at=HEAD

We use this to set the version number in the setup.

Output example:

v1.0.0

Works on Windows, too.

Answer 5

I'm using this bash oneline command to get either the latest tag, either the branch name :

git name-rev --tags --name-only HEAD | cut -d '^' -f 1 | grep -v 'undefined' || git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

This helps me to set the version of my app.

Answer 6

The problem with describe in CI/CD processes is you can run into the fatal: no tags can describe error.

This will occur because, per git describe --help:

The command finds the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit.

If you want the latest tag in the repo, regardless if the branch you are on can reach the tag, typically because it is not part of the current branch's tree, this command will give you the most recently created tag in the entire repo:

git tag -l --sort=-creatordate | head -n 1

More details and other keys to sort on can be found here: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-for-each-ref#_field_names

Answer 7

git describe --abbrev=0 --tags

If you don't see latest tag, make sure of fetching origin before running that:

git remote update

Answer 8

I'm not sure why there are no answers to what the question is asking for. i.e. All tags (non-annotated included) and without the suffix:

git describe --tags --abbrev=0

Answer 9

To get the most recent tag (example output afterwards):

git describe --tags --abbrev=0   # 0.1.0-dev

To get the most recent tag, with the number of additional commits on top of the tagged object & more:

git describe --tags              # 0.1.0-dev-93-g1416689

To get the most recent annotated tag:

git describe --abbrev=0

Answer 10

git tag --sort=-refname | awk 'match($0, /^[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+$/)' | head -n 1 

This one gets the latest tag across all branches that matches Semantic Versioning.

Answer 11

Not much mention of unannotated tags vs annotated ones here. 'describe' works on annotated tags and ignores unannotated ones.

This is ugly but does the job requested and it will not find any tags on other branches (and not on the one specified in the command: master in the example below)

The filtering should prob be optimized (consolidated), but again, this seems to the the job.

git log  --decorate --tags master |grep '^commit'|grep 'tag:.*)$'|awk '{print $NF}'|sed 's/)$//'|head -n 1

Critiques welcome as I am going now to put this to use :)

Answer 12

git tag --sort=committerdate | tail -1

Answer 13

You can execute: git describe --tags $(git rev-list --tags --max-count=1) talked here: How to get latest tag name?

Answer 14

if your tags are sortable:

git tag --merged $YOUR_BRANCH_NAME | grep "prefix/" | sort | tail -n 1

Answer 15

If you want to find the last tag that was applied on a specific branch you can try the following:

git describe --tag $(git rev-parse --verify refs/remotes/origin/"branch_name")

Answer 16

For the question as asked,

How to get the latest tag name in the current branch

you want

git log --first-parent --pretty=%d | grep -m1 tag:

--first-parent tells git log not to detail any merged histories, --pretty=%d says to show only the decorations i.e. local names for any commits. grep -m1 says "match just one", so you get just the most-recent tag.

Answer 17

To get the latest tag only on the current branch/tag name that prefixes with current branch, I had to execute the following

BRANCH=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD` && git describe --tags --abbrev=0 $BRANCH^ | grep $BRANCH

Branch master:

git checkout master

BRANCH=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD` && git describe --tags 
--abbrev=0 $BRANCH^ | grep $BRANCH

master-1448

Branch custom:

git checkout 9.4

BRANCH=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD` && git describe --tags 
--abbrev=0 $BRANCH^ | grep $BRANCH

9.4-6

And my final need to increment and get the tag +1 for next tagging.

BRANCH=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD` && git describe --tags  --abbrev=0 $BRANCH^ | grep $BRANCH | awk -F- '{print $NF}'

Answer 18

git tag -l ac* | tail -n1

Get the last tag with prefix "ac". For example, tag named with ac1.0.0, or ac1.0.5. Other tags named 1.0.0, 1.1.0 will be ignored.

git tag -l [0-9].* | tail -n1

Get the last tag, whose first char is 0-9. So, those tags with first char a-z will be ignored.

More info

git tag --help # Help for `git tag`

---

git tag -l <pattern>

List tags with names that match the given pattern (or all if no pattern is given). Running "git tag" without arguments also lists all tags. The pattern is a shell wildcard (i.e., matched using fnmatch(3)). Multiple patterns may be given; if any of them matches, the tag is shown.

---

tail -n <number> # display the last part of a file
tail -n1 # Display the last item 

---

Update

With git tag --help, about the sort argument. It will use lexicorgraphic order by default, if tag.sort property doesn't exist.

Sort order defaults to the value configured for the tag.sort variable if it exists, or lexicographic order otherwise. See git-config(1).

After google, someone said git 2.8.0 support following syntax.

git tag --sort=committerdate

Answer 19

This is an old thread, but it seems a lot of people are missing the simplest, easiest, and most correct answer to OP's question: to get the latest tag for the current branch, you use git describe HEAD. Done.

Edit: you can also supply any valid refname, even remotes; i.e., git describe origin/master will tell you the latest tag that can be reached from origin/master.

Answer 20

What is wrong with all suggestions (except Matthew Brett explanation, up to date of this answer post)?

Just run any command supplied by other on jQuery Git history when you at different point of history and check result with visual tagging history representation (I did that is why you see this post):

$ git log --graph --all --decorate --oneline --simplify-by-decoration

Todays many project perform releases (and so tagging) in separate branch from mainline.

There are strong reason for this. Just look to any well established JS/CSS projects. For user conventions they carry binary/minified release files in DVCS. Naturally as project maintainer you don't want to garbage your mainline diff history with useless binary blobs and perform commit of build artifacts out of mainline.

Because Git uses DAG and not linear history - it is hard to define distance metric so we can say - oh that rev is most nearest to my HEAD!

I start my own journey in (look inside, I didn't copy fancy proof images to this long post):

What is nearest tag in the past with respect to branching in Git?

Currently I have 4 reasonable definition of distance between tag and revision with decreasing of usefulness:

• length of shortest path from HEAD to merge base with tag
• date of merge base between HEAD and tag
• number of revs that reachable from HEAD but not reachable from tag
• date of tag regardless merge base

I don't know how to calculate length of shortest path.

Script that sort tags according to date of merge base between HEAD and tag:

$ git tag \
     | while read t; do \
         b=`git merge-base HEAD $t`; \
         echo `git log -n 1 $b --format=%ai` $t; \
       done | sort

It usable on most of projects.

Script that sort tags according to number of revs that reachable from HEAD but not reachable from tag:

$ git tag \
    | while read t; do echo `git rev-list --count $t..HEAD` $t; done \
    | sort -n

If your project history have strange dates on commits (because of rebases or another history rewriting or some moron forget to replace BIOS battery or other magics that you do on history) use above script.

For last option (date of tag regardless merge base) to get list of tags sorted by date use:

$ git log --tags --simplify-by-decoration --pretty="format:%ci %d" | sort -r

To get known current revision date use:

$ git log --max-count=1

Note that git describe --tags have usage on its own cases but not for finding human expected nearest tag in project history.

NOTE You can use above recipes on any revision, just replace HEAD with what you want!

Answer 21

Will output the tag of the latest tagged commit across all branches

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

Answer 22

"Most recent" could have two meanings in terms of git.

You could mean, "which tag has the creation date latest in time", and most of the answers here are for that question. In terms of your question, you would want to return tag c.

Or you could mean "which tag is the closest in development history to some named branch", usually the branch you are on, HEAD. In your question, this would return tag a.

These might be different of course:

A->B->C->D->E->F (HEAD)
       \     \
        \     X->Y->Z (v0.2)
         P->Q (v0.1)

Imagine the developer tag'ed Z as v0.2 on Monday, and then tag'ed Q as v0.1 on Tuesday. v0.1 is the more recent, but v0.2 is closer in development history to HEAD, in the sense that the path it is on starts at a point closer to HEAD.

I think you usually want this second answer, closer in development history. You can find that out by using git log v0.2..HEAD etc for each tag. This gives you the number of commits on HEAD since the path ending at v0.2 diverged from the path followed by HEAD.

Here's a Python script that does that by iterating through all the tags running this check, and then printing out the tag with fewest commits on HEAD since the tag path diverged:

https://github.com/MacPython/terryfy/blob/master/git-closest-tag

git describe does something slightly different, in that it tracks back from (e.g.) HEAD to find the first tag that is on a path back in the history from HEAD. In git terms, git describe looks for tags that are "reachable" from HEAD. It will therefore not find tags like v0.2 that are not on the path back from HEAD, but a path that diverged from there.

Answer 23

How about this?

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

Technically, won't necessarily get you the latest tag, but the latest commit which is tagged, which may or may not be the thing you're looking for.

Answer 24

git log --tags --no-walk --pretty="format:%d" | sed 2q | sed 's/[()]//g' | sed s/,[^,]*$// | sed  's ......  '

IF YOU NEED MORE THAN ONE LAST TAG

(git describe --tags sometimes gives wrong hashes, i dont know why, but for me --max-count 2 doesnt work)

this is how you can get list with latest 2 tag names in reverse chronological order, works perfectly on git 1.8.4. For earlier versions of git(like 1.7.*), there is no "tag: " string in output - just delete last sed call

If you want more than 2 latest tags - change this "sed 2q" to "sed 5q" or whatever you need

Then you can easily parse every tag name to variable or so.

Answer 25

To get the most recent tag, you can do:

$ git for-each-ref refs/tags --sort=-taggerdate --format='%(refname)' --count=1

Of course, you can change the count argument or the sort field as desired. It appears that you may have meant to ask a slightly different question, but this does answer the question as I interpret it.

Answer 26

git describe --tags

returns the last tag able to be seen by current branch

Answer 27

The following works for me in case you need last two tags (for example, in order to generate change log between current tag and the previous tag). I've tested it only in situation where the latest tag was the HEAD.

PreviousAndCurrentGitTag=`git describe --tags \`git rev-list --tags --abbrev=0 --max-count=2\` --abbrev=0`
PreviousGitTag=`echo $PreviousAndCurrentGitTag | cut -f 2 -d ' '`
CurrentGitTag=`echo $PreviousAndCurrentGitTag | cut -f 1 -d ' '`

GitLog=`git log ${PreviousGitTag}..${CurrentGitTag} --pretty=oneline | sed "s_.\{41\}\(.*\)_; \1_"`

It suits my needs, but as I'm no git wizard, I'm sure it could be further improved. I also suspect it will break in case the commit history moves forward. I'm just sharing in case it helps someone.

Answer 28

My first thought is you could use git rev-list HEAD, which lists all the revs in reverse chronological order, in combination with git tag --contains. When you find a ref where git tag --contains produces a nonempty list, you have found the most recent tag(s).

Answer 29

You could take a look at git describe, which does something close to what you're asking.