Sort Git Tags by Date

One of the libraries that I develop has a lot of tags. During a sprint, we tag new builds as alpha. At the end, we build a final release which we tag as a beta. When it comes to assigning the version number for this beta, I usually can’t remember what version we’re on. Thankfully, Git has a simple way to list all of your tags in chronological order:

git tag --sort=taggerdate

This command will print a list to the console like this:

alpha1
alpha2
beta1
alpha3
alpha4
beta2

You can make it even simpler by writing an npm script in package.json:

{
	"scripts": {
		"tags": "git tag --sort=taggerdate"
	}
}

Then you can call it like this:

npm run tags

This is incredibly useful to me and I hope that it helps you too.