How do you push a tag to a remote repository using Git?

Question

I have cloned a remote Git repository to my laptop, then I wanted to add a tag so I ran

git tag mytag master 

When I run git tag on my laptop the tag mytag is shown. I then want to push this to the remote repository so I have this tag on all my clients, so I run git push but I got the message:

Everything up-to-date

And if I go to my desktop and run git pull and then git tag no tags are shown.

I have also tried to do a minor change on a file in the project, then push it to the server. After that I could pull the change from the server to my Desktop computer, but there's still no tag when running git tag on my desktop computer.

How can I push my tag to the remote repository so that all client computers can see it?

Answer 1

To push a single tag:

git push origin <tag_name> 

And the following command should push all tags (not recommended):

# not recommended git push --tags 

Answer 2

git push --follow-tags

This is a sane option introduced in Git 1.8.3:

git push --follow-tags 

It pushes both commits and only tags that are both:

• annotated
• reachable (an ancestor) from the pushed commits

This is sane because:

• you should only push annotated tags to the remote, and keep lightweight tags for local development to avoid tag clashes. See also: What is the difference between an annotated and unannotated tag?
• it won't push annotated tags on unrelated branches

It is for those reasons that --tags should be avoided.

Git 2.4 has added the push.followTags option to turn that flag on by default which you can set with:

git config --global push.followTags true 

or by adding followTags = true to the [push] section of your ~/.gitconfig file.