Skip to main content

Git–Lightweight vs Annotated tags

While investigating some ways to label our releases inside Azure DevOps I discovered that there are in fact 2 types of tags:  lightweight and annotated.

From the documentation:

A lightweight tag is very much like a branch that doesn’t change — it’s just a pointer to a specific commit.

Annotated tags, however, are stored as full objects in the Git database. They’re checksummed; contain the tagger name, email, and date; have a tagging message; and can be signed and verified with GNU Privacy Guard (GPG). It’s generally recommended that you create annotated tags so you can have all this information; but if you want a temporary tag or for some reason don’t want to keep the other information, lightweight tags are available too

Azure DevOps Services and TFS support both annotated and lightweight tags.  Go to the Repos section(1) and select Tags from the menu(2). Now you can start searching for both tag types(3):

When you type a tag name, tags are filtered.

Annotated tags are displayed with a tag name, message, commit, tagger, and creation date(e.g. demo2 in the screenshot above). Lightweight tags are displayed with a tag name and commit(e.g. demo in the screenshot above).

You can create annotated tags using the web portal, and starting with Visual Studio 2017 Update 6, you can create both lightweight and annotated tags from within Visual Studio:

Open up Visual Studio and go to Team Explorer. Select Tags from the available options. Click on New Tag to create a new one.

To create an annotated tag, provide both a name and a message when creating the tag. To create a lightweight tag, omit the message and supply only a name.

Which tag type should I use?

I prefer to use annotated tags because of the extra metadata it allows you to add. The fact that you know who created the tag but also the option to add some extra comments make them far more usable than lightweight tags.

I’m aware that an annotated tag can be signed as an extra level of security but I never had a reason to start doing this.

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B