Checking out a tag from a git repo

• June 20 2022
• 2 min. read

There are times when I need to check out a specific tag from a repository. I do this often enough that I chose to document the process.

A concrete example: I need to get the latest revision of the Gutenberg plugin so I can compile it and install it on my testing machine.

Because there is no branch, I can't just do:

 git checkout -b <branch-name>

So I had to research how to get creative in doing this.

The first step is to make sure we have all the tags available both to our origin and any upstream repositories.

We do this with git's fetch command and two flags:

--all To fetch from all configured remotes

--tags

Fetch all remote tags into local tags with the same name, in addition to whatever else would otherwise be fetched

git fetch --all --tags

We want to work with v13.3.0 so we need to get the tag:

git fetch --all --tags
Fetching origin
Fetching upstream
remote: Enumerating objects: 502, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (459/459), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (240/240), done.
remote: Total 502 (delta 283), reused 327 (delta 218), pack-reused 43
Receiving objects: 100% (502/502), 1.29 MiB | 7.24 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (289/289), completed with 102 local objects.
From https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg
   046ca65b20..81ac4cf385  trunk      -> upstream/trunk
 * [new tag]               v13.3.0    -> v13.3.0

Once you know the name of the tag, you can run the following command to check it out:

git checkout tags/v13.3.0 -b v13.0.0-branch

tags/v13.3.0 is the name of the tag we want to work with.

The -b flag tells git to create a branch named v13.0.0-branch and check it out.

Edit on Github