Using Tags in Git

Over the last few days I’ve released a couple of Laravel 4 packages: Meta and Shareable. I use Git tags to manage the release versions, which integrate well with GitHub and Packagist(the main Composer repository). Using tags on GitHub automatically creates releases of your code that can be viewed or downloaded, and Packagist uses tags to determine available versions of your packages. Luckily, using tags is as easy as running the following commands in your terminal:

git tag -a 1.0.0 -m "Version 1.0.0"
git push --tags

The first line above create a tag called “1.0.0” and associates the message “Version 1.0.0” with it. The next line pushes your tags to your remote repository.

That’s all there is to it. Tags provide a great mechanism for marking code releases, and provide nice reference points to older releases.