Ever find yourself moving a git tag to a new commit? You’ll probably know this procedure consists out of three steps;

• Removing the existing tag from your origin
• Manually moving the tag (using -f to allow moving)
• Pushing the tag back your origin

Since this procedure is more cumbersome that it could be, behold, a quick and easy life hack to automate this process into a single custom command.

Before you start

• Make sure you have a $HOME/bin directory
• Make sure that directory is in your PATH

The script

• Put this script in your $HOME/bin directory:

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#!/bin/bash

((!$#)) && echo No tag given, command ignored! && exit 1
if git rev-parse $1 >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    git push origin :refs/tags/$1
    git tag -f $1
    git push origin $1
else
    echo Tag not found in repo, are you sure you know what you\'re doing? && exit 1
fi

• Make it executable by running chmod u+x $HOME/bin/git-retag
• Enjoy!

Testing

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git retag 0.48.0
To upstream.repo.url:test/test.git
 - [deleted]         0.48.0
Updated tag '0.48.0' (was 1276686)
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To upstream.repo.url:test/test.git
 * [new tag]         0.48.0 -> 0.48.0