Mastering Git & GitHub Tags: The Complete Developer’s Guide

Git is an essential tool for version control, helping developers track code changes, collaborate with teams, and manage various versions of a project. While commits are the foundation of Git's versioning, tags provide a way to mark specific points in history, often to mark releases or milestones. In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into Git tags, including how to create, list, push, and delete tags—both locally and remotely.

What Are Git Tags?

Git tags are references to specific points in a Git history, commonly used to mark important milestones such as releases. Unlike branches, which are mutable and change over time, tags are meant to be permanent pointers to specific commits.

There are two types of tags in Git:

1. Lightweight tags – These are essentially just pointers to a commit and don’t store additional information.
2. Annotated tags – These are stored as full objects in the Git database, with metadata like the tagger’s name, email, date, and an optional message. Annotated tags are the recommended type because they carry more information.

1. Creating a Tag in Git

Creating a Lightweight Tag