I'm currently busy with a project with a lot of branches and I have a tag for last changes which where done on one of the branches. But it's not clear for me on which branch this tag is.
How to find out on which branch a tag is?
Even shorter:
git branch --contains tags/<tag> (it works for any tree-ish reference)
If you can find which commit a tag refers to:
git rev-parse --verify tags/<tag>^{commit} # or, shorter: git rev-parse tags/<tag>~0 Then you can find which branch contain that commit.
git branch --contains <commit> As commented below by user3356885, for the fetched branches (branches in remotes namespace)
git branch -a --contains tags/<tag> git branch -a --contains <commit> As noted in Pyr3z's answer, for each candidate tag listed above, you can add:
git log -1 --pretty='%D' TAG That will show the branches associated to that tag.
git branch --contains <tag>.git branch -a --contains <tag>. Same will work for commits.git branch --contains <tag>. git version 2.23.0, zsh, open SUSE tumbleweed. I do not think this is specific to my OS or shell, I think this is the default thing modern git versions do. They open a list in a pagerIf "git branch --contains " does nothing, be sure that you are including all branches, both remote and local branches:
git branch -a --contains <tag> From the git help:
Specific git-branch actions: -a, --all list both remote-tracking and local branches
—specifically solutions like
git branch -a --contains TAG and similar had the problem of being able to list multiple branches in the output, and it isn't clear which is the one the tag ACTUALLY originated in:
$ git branch --contains TAG branch-A branch-B * branch-C branch-D (the * marks the current branch = not relevant)
Oh, and sorting with --sort=-committerdate or =-taggerdate doesn't exactly clarify the original branch, since these ref attributes can be updated by actions not related to the TAG in question.
git show TAGDID give me the true answer to my question ("which branch was this tag created on?"), however the git show format is quite bulky by default, and what I was looking for was an efficient, machine-friendly output format in order to pass to some automated scripts.
git log is the core command for the job:git log -1 --format='%D' TAG This gives output like:
tag: TAG, origin/branch-B, branch-B Which tells us exactly the branch the tag originated on, and is much more machine-readable.
git log?git log -1 --format='%D' TAG | grep -Eo '[^ ]+$' Not 100% certain, worked in my tests but it assumes that the branch name you're after is always listed last.git branch --contains tag does nothing for me, but I found my solution to this problem in git gui.
Start it like this:
git gui (On my Ubuntu I had to install it first with sudo apt-get install git-gui.)
Then I selected the menu item Repository -> Visualize All Branch History. In the resulting window I then selected the menu item File -> List References.
Another window popped up, listing all my tags (and other references). These are clickable and after clicking one of them I just had to check the bottom left frame for the list of branches. Like this:
Parent: somesha (message) Parent: someothersha (another message) Child: anothersha (yet another message) Branches: branch1, master, remotes/origin/branch2, remotes/upstream/branch1, etc Follows: v1.1.2 Precedes: v1.1.4 With a Tag you mark a reference. So when you are on a dev branch and Tag this state. Your tag is on the actual reference. So in this case you can look to gitk or another tool where the tree is shown. There you can see on which reference the Tag is.
git: Is there something like per-branch tags?
http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Basics-Tagging
Here is a good explanation.