Question

I’m having trouble finding out which tag is currently checked out.

When I do:

git checkout tag1
git branch

I can’t seem to find out which tag I’m on. It only logs:

* (no branch)
master

Is it possible to find out which tags are checked out? In the above example, this would be tag1.

Answer 1

Edit

Jakub Narębski has more git-fu. The following much simpler command works perfectly:

git describe --tags

(Or without the --tags if you have checked out an annotated tag. My tag is lightweight, so I need the --tags.)

Original answer

git describe --exact-match --tags $(git log -n1 --pretty='%h')

Someone with more git-fu may have a more elegant solution…

This leverages the fact that git-log reports the log starting from what you’ve checked out. %h prints the abbreviated hash. Then git describe --exact-match --tags finds the tag (lightweight or annotated) that exactly matches that commit.

The $() syntax above assumes you’re using bash or similar.