How to push all annotated tags?

Question

How do I push all annotated tags from my local repo to the remote, without pushing lightweight tags?

I use lightweight tags locally that I don't want pushed, so git push --tags is not a solution.

I am aware of git push --follow-tags but that will only push tags that are associated with commits currently being pushed.

I need this option because my normal workflow involves pushing from time to time, but only tagging when finalizing a release, and I sometimes forget to push a tag. This problem often goes undetected for a long time and causes a bit of confusion with other developers, since we become out of sync with our tags.

Since it's complicated to list which annotated tags exist locally but not remotely, I would like to solve this problem by just pushing all local annotated tags, which will ensure that all developers' local and remote repos have the same annotated tags.

Answer 1

It's not too difficult. First find all annotated tags (by rejecting tags that point directly to commits rather than to annotated tag objects). This is a bit long, so you might wish to write it as a shell function:

list_annotated_tags() {
    git for-each-ref --format '%(objecttype) %(refname)' refs/tags |
        while read reftype refname; do
            case $reftype in tag) echo $refname;; esac
        done
}

Read the output of the above and use them as refspec arguments to a git push command:

git push origin $(list_annotated_tags)

and your script is complete.

Answer 2

I noticed that my lightweight tags don't include a taggerdate. In that case, this will work at the command line or in a script:

taglist=`git for-each-ref refs/tags --format '%(refname:short) %09 %(taggerdate:short)' | \
grep -E '[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}' | \
cut -f 1 | \
tr '\n' ' '`

followed by:

git push origin $taglist

Command summary, for anyone who is interested:

• 1st line - retrieves a git for-each-ref tag list, formatted to show the tagname, a tab, and the date. (Only annotated tags will have a date.)
• 2nd line - grep command searches through the 1st command's results, pulling only those tags with dates.
• 3rd line - cut command removes everything after the initial column (ie, from before the tab following each tagname to the newline ending each result line).
• 4th line - tr command replaces newline with a space in the end results. (The tagnames are now on one line, separated with spaces.)

The results are stored in a variable (taglist - note the backticks at the beginning and end of the entire command set following the taglist=).

Finally, then, you push the tag list to origin (using a $ to indicate that taglist is a variable).