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This article outlines the steps required to tag old commits in Git. We use git tags to mark specific points in our commit history as important.

Typically, a git tag marks a stable release or an important milestone in a project. How do you tag any git commit?

Tagging an older commit in Git

For the sake of simpler context, we will use a hypothetical situation.

Assume that our production code is in a Git repository. We have made several commits to our repository since the beginning of the project.

We want to tag the first commit in our repository and mark it as the latest stable version of our code. How can we do that?

Assuming the following diagram represents our commit history, how do we mark the first commit?

To tag a commit, we use the command with the -a option git tag. We must also pass the SHA-1 of the commit we want to tag.

In our example, we will run:

$ git tag -a v1.0 9d0a878 -m "Stable"

We pass a message to our tag using the -m flag. We can push the tag to the remote repository as shown in the following image.

$ git push --tags

The above method will create a tag with the current date and time. If you want to create a tag with the commit date and time, follow the steps below.

We first need to move HEAD to the commit we want to tag. We will use git checkoutthe command, as shown below.

$ git checkout 9d0a878

To get the date and time of the current commit, we would run:

$ git show --format=%aD  | head -1
Mon, 8 Aug 2022 14:30:26 +0300

To tag our commits with the date and time they were made, we will run:

$ GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="$(git show --format=%aD | head -1)" \
>  git tag -a v1.0 -m"Stable"

We can then push the tag to the remote.

$ git push --tags

Our tag should have the date and time of the commit. Let's confirm our case on GitHub.

In short, you can tag arbitrary commits in Git. We have already discussed how to tag old commits with and without their date and time.