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In this article, we will discuss moving tags in Git. We do not encourage moving tags, especially if we are working as a team, as it disrupts the timeline of our project.

Nevertheless, Git allows us to move tags around when needed. Let's look at a practical example.

Moving an existing tag in Git

To simulate a scenario where we want to move a tag to the most recent commit, we'll create a tag V1, make some commits, and try to move the tag to the most recent commit. Let's get started.

This is the commit history of our local repository.

$ git log --oneline

We'll use git tagthe command to V1put the tag Sixth Updateon the commit.

$ git tag V1

As you can see from git logthe output, the tag is now located at Sixth Update. Let's edit the file in the repo and commit the changes.

This is the commit history of our new repository.

$ git log --oneline

If we try to run git tagthe command, we will get this error.

$ git tag V1
fatal: tag 'V1' already exists

We can always create another tag, but suppose we've already created V1the tag and realize we missed some modifications. How do we move the tag after committing the missed changes?

Like several other commands in Git, we can force our way through. We will have to use the command with the -r --forceoption git tagas shown below.

$ git tag --force V1

Let's check our commit history.

$ git log --oneline

If we have already pushed, we can continue publishing to the remote repository. However, we need to add --forcethe option to force the remote to update.

$ git push origin V1 --force

That's all you need to do to move tags in Git. But before we sign off, let's see how we can pull after another developer has updated a tag in the remote repository.

The first step is to delete the tag in our local repository. We run the following command.

$ git tag -d V1

Now we can run git pullthe command to update our local repository.

$ git pull

This should update the tag in your local repo.

We can move tags in Git by git tagintroducing --force-t option in the command. When working on a joint project, be careful while creating and moving tags.

You might mess up the timeline of your project.