I’m mainly writing this down for my own benefit, but others might find this useful. In a previous post about setting up git to deploy to a remote web server, I wrote about a way to display the lastest abbreviated commit hash in your web app’s footer.
Today, I discovered that simply running:
git describe
will output the most recent tag and the current abbreviated commit hash (if there are commits after the tag), so you can use tags to show more human-readable versions of your app (v1.0, etc.) along with the current commit. Unfortunately, you apparently can’t run ‘git describe’ on a bare git repository like what I’m using for deployment on the remote server.