How to Create a Branch From a Tag in Git

This article illustrates how we can create a new branch based on a tag in Git. If you are a regular Git user, you must know the purpose of Git tags.

These tags are simply indicators that point to a meaningful Git commit. The question is: how do you create a branch based on a Git tag?

Create a Branch From a Tag in Git

We can see the commits with tags if we run the git log command. Here is our commit history:

Let’s say we wanted to create a new branch based on the tag v1.o.5 at the Release v1.0.5 - Bump Codebase Version commit. How would we go about it?

It is pretty simple. We will use the git branch command as illustrated below:

$ git checkout -b Tag-Branch v1.0.5

This command will create a new branch called Tag-Branch and carry all the commits up to the tag, including the one at the tag. Let’s check if this is the case.

We can see that Git has created a new branch. The commits that came after our tag was deleted when creating the branch.

Alternatively, we can opt to reset the HEAD to the tag and create a new branch based on the head. It is not a clean way since you will remove the commits from your branch.

You can run the command below:

$ git reset --hard <tag>
$ git checkout -b newbranch

In conclusion, Git allows us to create new local branches based on any tag in our repository. Using the git reset --hard option is not always the best option.

The git branch -b new-branch <tag> is a cleaner way of creating branches based on tags.