git tag: fatal: Failed to resolve 'HEAD' as a valid ref

Question

I am cloning a single branch from a repository and creating a tag in a python script. The commands are as follows.

git clone -b master --single-branch <repository adress>

git tag -a testag -m 'test'

It clones successfully but when it comes to adding the tag, it breaks with the following error:

fatal: Failed to resolve 'HEAD' as a valid ref.

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue and was able to fix it by changing from

git tag -a testtag -m 'test'

to

git tag -a testtag -m "test"

I was running in Windows 7. Hope this helps :-)

Answer 2

I had the same issue. You have to commit first before tagging

git commit

because you put tags on commits. So when there is no commit (like in your situation), you can't create a tag.