How do you rename a Git tag?

Question

Today I was looking through the logs for a project and realized that I fat fingered a tag name some time ago. Is there some way to rename the tag? Google hasn't turned up anything useful.

I realize I could check out the tagged version and make a new tag, I even tried that. But that seems to create a tag object that isn't quite right. For one,

git tag -l 

lists it out of order relative to all of the other tags. I have no idea if that's significant, but it leads me to believe that the new tag object isn't quite what I want. I can live with that, because I really only care that the tag name matches the documentation, but I'd rather do it "right", assuming there is a right way to do this.

Answer 1

Here is how I rename a tag old to new:

git tag new old git tag -d old git push origin new :old 

The colon in the push command removes the tag from the remote repository. If you don't do this, Git will create the old tag on your machine when you pull. Finally, make sure that the other users remove the deleted tag. Please tell them (co-workers) to run the following command:

git pull --prune --tags 

Note that if you are changing an annotated tag, you need ensure that the new tag name is referencing the underlying commit and not the old annotated tag object that you're about to delete. Therefore, use git tag -a new old^{} instead of git tag new old (this is because annotated tags are objects while lightweight tags are not, more info in this answer).