In a nutshell, here’s what you need to add to your global configuration to make Git Notes work (in this case I’m using a test repository for demonstration purposes):

The rest of this article will explain why the above is necessary and how it all works.

You’ll need to expliclity define what you want to fetch and push for your remote origin configuration. By default, when you clone a repository, you’ll see these settings for your remote origin configuration:

These default settings are great for most operations but — to synchronize notes — you’ll need to make additional edits so that your configuration looks like the following:

The above explicitly defines what is to be fetched and pushed (i.e. heads, notes, and tags). By default, the fetching and pushing of heads and tags is handled for you. The automatic pushing of heads is especially important because it’s not a defined configuration and is implicitly configured and resolved automatically for you. Since we need to teach the remote how to handle notes we also need to define (or redefine) head and tag behavior. Otherwise, you’d lose instead of gain functionality.

When talking to Junio C Hamano — a core Git contributor — on Git Lore, I learned the lack of the + prefix is critical when pushing in a manner that will not clobber other’s work. Hamano also recommends that this is a great practice, in general, to prevent downstream history from being disrupted even when you are the only one pushing to your publishing point (i.e. branch) and you rewind your history. This is especially true for me since I heavily rely on a Git Rebase workflow.

When working with Git Notes, you might want to use a few Bash aliases to speed up your workflow:

You can also get fancy and use functions to interactively work with notes. Here’s an example of a Bash function which allows you to select a commit you want to add a note too:

In a nutshell, the above allows you to acquire the SHAs of all commits on the current branch so you can view and select which commit you want to add a note to. Super handy! Anyway, you can find all of the above and more via my Dotfiles project if you want to pilfer and tweak for your own needs.

By default, when using Git Rebase, your notes will be orphaned since the SHA of the original commit will change. To prevent this behavior, you can add the following global configuration:

The above will ensure your notes are not lost, even when rebasing. For the astute documentation readers, you’ll notice the above is also the default reference for notes but you must set this configuration, though identical to the default, or rebasing with notes won’t work.

When pushing for the first time on a new feature branch, you’ll see the following:

…​but neither the branch or the notes will be pushed up. GitHub doesn’t report the truth.

When rebasing, you can use git push --force-with-lease as you’ll end up with the following error:

You have to drop the --force-with-lease flag.

When using GitHub, the following limitations and restrictions are important to be aware of when using Git commit notes via GitHub:

To be clear, this isn’t specific to GitHub but other services like GitLab, Bitbucket, etc. In truth, you shouldn’t rely on these services since Git is more feature rich. Even better, you can use tooling like, Milestoner, as explained below.

Milestoner shines where GitHub fails because Milestoner enhances what Git provides by default by allowing you to view your commits and associated notes in multiple formats, locally, for quick review. The following is an example of using Milestoner to check the status of a project which has not been versioned yet (i.e. milestoner build --format web):

Whenever you add notes to your commit (i.e. git notes add <sha>) and rebuild your release notes, Milestoner will reflect those changes within the UI. 🎉

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look into using Git Notes so you can get the most out of Git and even enhance your workflow with additional tooling like Bash alliases/functions, Milestoner, and more. Enjoy!