On Git, tags are often used in order to tag specific commits that may be more important than others.
Tags may be used in order to bookmark certain events : releases, bug-fixes or just to add an informative and descriptive note to a commit.
On GitHub, tags are often associated with actual product releases for example.
However, in some cases, you may want to delete Git tags easily locally or remotely.
Delete a local Git tag
In order to delete a local Git tag, use the git tag command with the -d option.
git tag -d <tag_name>
For example, if you wanted to delete a local tag named “v0.1” on your commit list, you would run
git tag -d v0.1
The output will be:
Deleted tag 'v0.1' (was 88f2a35)
If you try to delete a Git tag that does not exist, you will simply be notified that the tag does not exist.
git tag -d v0.2
the output will be:
error: tag 'v0.2' not found.
If you want to make sure that tags were correctly deleted, simply list your existing tags using the tag command and the -l option.
git tag -l
Delete a remote Git tag
In order to delete a remote Git tag, use the git push command with the -–delete option and specify the tag name.
git push --delete origin <tagname>
Back to the previous example, if you want to delete the remote Git tag named “v0.1”, you would run
git push --delete origin v0.1
the output will be:
To https://github.com/ZigRazor/repo.git
- [deleted] v0.1
To delete a remote Git tag, you can also use the git push command and specify the tag name using the refs syntax.
git push origin :refs/tags/<tag>
Back to the example, in order to delete a tag named “v0.1”, you would run
git push origin :refs/tags/v0.1
the output will be:
To https://github.com/ZigRazor/repo.git
- [deleted] v0.1
Why should we specify the “refs/tags” instead of just specifying the tagname?
In some cases, your tag may have the same name as your branch.
If you tried to delete your Git tag without specifying the “refs/tags” you would get the following error
git push origin :v1.0
error: dst refspec v1.0 matches more than one.
error: failed to push some refs to '<repository>'
As a consequence, you need to specify that you are actually trying to delete a Git tag and not a Git repository.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you learnt how you can easily delete a local and a remote Git tag.
For More "The Final Guide" see the Index Page
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