How to get tags on current commit

Question

I have a repository which has multiple tags on the same commit. For example:

commit #3 <--- TAG1 / TAG2 / TAG3

  |

commit #2 <--- TAG4/ TAG5

  |

commit #1 <--- TAG6/ TAG7

I'd like to find out what tags are on a particular commit. For example, if I check commit 1, I'd like to get tag 6 and tag 7.

I have tried:

git checkout <commit 1> 
git tag --contains

which displayed tags 1-7.

git checkout <commit 1>
git describe --tags HEAD

displayed tag 6 only.

What is the proper way to do this in Git?

Answer 1

If you are using git tag --points-at HEAD, make sure to use Git 2.42 (Q3 2023).

"git tag --list --points-at X"^(man) showed tags that directly refers to object X, but did not list a tag that points at such a tag, which has been corrected with Git 2.42 (Q3 2023).

See commit d9e0062, commit 870eb53, commit b9584c5 (02 Jul 2023) by Jeff King (peff).
See commit 468887f (01 Jul 2023) by Jan Klötzke (jkloetzke).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 5929e66, 25 Jul 2023)}

ref-filter: handle nested tags in --points-at option

^{Signed-off-by: Jan Klötzke}

Tags are dereferenced until reaching a different object type to handle nested tags, e.g. on checkout.
In contrast, "git tag --points-at=..."^(man) fails to list such nested tags because only one level of indirection is obtained in filter_refs().

Implement the recursive dereferencing for the "--points-at" option when filtering refs to unify the behaviour.

That will list nested tag, and that will do it faster:

ref-filter: avoid parsing tagged objects in match_points_at()

^{Signed-off-by: Jeff King}

When we peel tags to check if they match a --points-at oid, we recursively parse the tagged object to see if it is also a tag.
But since the tag itself tells us the type of the object it points to (and even gives us the appropriate object struct via its "tagged" member), we can use that directly.

We do still have to make sure to call parse_tag() before looking at each tag.
This is redundant for the outermost tag (since we did call parse_object() to find its type), but that's OK; parse_tag() is smart enough to make this a noop when the tag has already been parsed.

In my clone of linux.git, with 782 tags (and only 3 non-tags), this yields a significant speedup (bringing us back where we were before the commit before this one started recursively dereferencing tags):

Benchmark 1: ./git.old for-each-ref --points-at=HEAD --format="%(refname)"
  Time (mean ± σ):      20.3 ms ±   0.5 ms    [User: 11.1 ms, System: 9.1 ms]
  Range (min … max):    19.6 ms …  21.5 ms    141 runs

Benchmark 2: ./git.new for-each-ref --points-at=HEAD --format="%(refname)"
  Time (mean ± σ):      11.4 ms ±   0.2 ms    [User: 6.3 ms, System: 5.0 ms]
  Range (min … max):    11.0 ms …  12.2 ms    250 runs

Summary
  './git.new for-each-ref --points-at=HEAD --format="%(refname)"' ran
    1.79 ± 0.05 times faster than './git.old for-each-ref --points-at=HEAD --format="%(refname)"'

Answer 2

I'm doing git tag -l | grep $(git describe HEAD) it returns the tag of the latest commit, or nothing if the last commit isn't tagged

Answer 3

For completion (thanks to Ciro Santili answer), git tag has got the option --points-at that does exactly what OP is asking.

git tag --points-at HEAD

It does not have the effect of also listing the tags put on forward commits (as Jonathan Hartley stated in his comment regarding git tag --contains).

Answer 4

git tag --points-at

--points-at

Only list tags of the given object (HEAD if not specified). Implies --list.

from https://git-scm.com/docs/git-tag

Answer 5

This displays the commit id of HEAD, as well as any branches or any tags that also happen to be exactly at HEAD.

git reflog --decorate -1

Sample output:

484c27b (HEAD, tag: deployment-2014-07-30-2359, master, origin/master) HEAD@{0}: 484c27b878ca5ab45185267f4a6b56f8f8d39892: updating HEAD

Answer 6

Here's a refinement of @JoshLee's answer, which manipulates the output to list only tags (not branches, nor HEAD) and strips the word 'tag:' and decorative punctuation. This is useful if you are scripting something up which needs to find the current tags (e.g. put them in your prompt):

git log -n1 --pretty="format:%d" | sed "s/, /\n/g" | grep tag: | sed "s/tag: \|)//g"

Example output:

$ git log -n 1 --decorate=short
commit a9313...c7f2 (HEAD, tag: v1.0.1, tag: uat, mybranch)
...
$ git log -n1 --pretty="format:%d" | sed "s/, /\n/g" | grep tag: | sed "s/tag: \|)//g"
v1.0.1
uat

Answer 7

I guess maybe git has had some options added since this question was asked, but since it still comes in pretty high on google, I thought I'd add that this way works nicely:

git tag -l --contains HEAD

Or replace HEAD with any other valid commit reference you like.

This will print a newline separated list of tags if the HEAD contains any tags, and print nothing otherwise, so you would get:

TAG6
TAG7

And of course there are lots of nice ways with various other shell tools that you can format that output once you have it...

Answer 8

Some improvements on William's answer:

git config --global alias.tags 'log -n1 --pretty=format:%h%d'

The output looks like this:

~$ git tags
7e5eb8f (HEAD, origin/next, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master)
~$ git tags HEAD~6
e923eae (tag: v1.7.0)

Answer 9

This is not ideal, but perhaps helpful:

$ git log -n 1 --decorate --pretty=oneline

You could play around with the format to get exactly what you want.