Git: Show the first tag containing a commit SHA

2024-04-22 Artist’s impression of a complex branching and tagging structure.

Say you have a commit SHA and want to know the first version it was released in. You can use this command:

$ git describe --contains <sha> | sed -E 's/[~^][0-9]*//g'

Replace <sha> with the commit SHA.

For example, I recently wanted to know which version of Django first contained commit 4555aa0, so I ran:

$ git describe --contains 4555aa0 | sed -E 's/[~^][0-9]*//g'
4.0a1

The pipeline first uses git describe to get a “description” for this commit, based upon containing tags:

$ git describe --contains 4555aa0
4.0a1~23

This command will either:

Output <tag>~<n> when the given commit is <n> commits before the <tag>.
Output <tag>^0 when the given commit is the one with tag <tag>.

Fail if the commit does not appear in any tags, such as:

$ git describe --contains c4bad802022
fatal: cannot describe 'c4bad802022ece9818d7edee1f7b5a43ba8484fb'

In the success cases, the sed command then strips the ~<n> or ^0 suffixes to leave just the tag name.

Add an alias

To make this command easier to run, add a Git alias for it. Add the following to your global configuration file (~/.git/config/git or ~/.gitconfig), merging with any existing [alias] section:

[alias]
    show-containing-tag = "!f() { git describe --contains \"$1\" | sed -E 's/[~^][0-9]*//g' ; }; f"

Then, run it like so:

$ git show-containing-tag 4555aa0
4.0a1

For more on how the alias works, refer to Boost Your Git DX.

List all containing tags

To list all tags that contain a given commit, use git tag with its --contains option:

$ git tag --sort=creatordate --contains 4555aa0
4.0a1
4.0b1
4.0rc1
4.0
4.0.1
...

Fin

Bag those tags,

—Adam

Read my book Boost Your Git DX for many more Git lessons.

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Tags: git