How to delete a remote tag

Question

How do you delete a Git tag that has already been pushed

User · Answer

Up to 100x faster method for thousands of remote tags

After reading through these answers while needing to delete over 11,000 tags, I learned these methods relying or xargs take far too long, unless you have hours to burn.

Struggling, I found two much faster ways. For both, start with git tag or git ls-remote --tags to make a list of tags you want to delete on the remote. In the examples below you can omit or replace sorting_proccessing_etc with any greping, sorting, tailing or heading you want (e.g. grep -P "my_regex" | sort | head -n -200 etc) :

This first method is by far the fastest, maybe 20 to 100 times faster than using `xargs`, and works with a least several thousand tags at a time.

git push origin $(< git tag | sorting_processing_etc \
| sed -e 's/^/:/' | paste -sd " ") #note exclude "<" for zsh

How does this work? The normal, line-separated list of tags is converted to a single line of space-separated tags, each prepended with : so . . .

tag1   becomes
tag2   ======>  :tag1 :tag2 :tag3
tag3

Using git push with this format tag pushes nothing into each remote ref, erasing it (the normal format for pushing this way is local_ref_path:remote_ref_path).

Method two is broken out as a separate answer elsewhere on this same page

After both of these methods, you'll probably want to delete your local tags too. This is much faster so we can go back to using xargs and git tag -d, which is sufficient.

git tag | sorting_processing_etc | xargs -L 1 git tag -d

OR similar to the remote delete:

git tag -d $(< git tag | sorting_processing_etc | paste -sd " ")

User · Answer

The other answers point out how to accomplish this  but you should keep in mind the consequences since this is a remote repository   The git tag man page  in the On Retagging section  has a good explanation of how to courteously inform the remote repo s other users of the change  They even give a handy announcement template for communicating how others should get your changes

User · Answer

I wanted to remove all tags except for those that match a pattern so that I could delete all but the last couple of months of production tags  here s what I used to great success   Delete All Remote Tags  amp  Exclude Expression From Delete  git tag -l   grep -P      Production-2017-0 89      xargs -n 1 git push --delete origin   Delete All Local Tags  amp  Exclude Expression From Delete  git tag -l   grep -P      Production-2017-0 89      xargs git tag -d

User · Answer

From your terminal  do this   git fetch git tags git tag -d  tag-name  git push origin  refs tags  tag-name    Now go to Github com and refresh  they disappear

User · Answer

If you have a remote tag v0 1 0 to delete  and your remote is origin  then simply   git push origin  refs tags v0 1 0   If you also need to delete the tag locally   git tag -d v0 1 0   See Adam Franco s answer for an explanation of Git s unusual   syntax for deletion

User · Answer

Delete all local tags and get the list of remote tags   git tag -l   xargs git tag -d git fetch   Remove all remote tags  git tag -l   xargs -n 1 git push --delete origin   Clean up local tags  git tag -l   xargs git tag -d

User · Answer

If you re using PowerShell  and you want to delete a bunch of them     Local tags  git tag -l   foreach   git tag -d         Remote tags  git tag -l   foreach   git push --delete origin        Of course  you can also filter them before deleting   git tag -l   Where-Object      -like  build-       foreach   git tag -d

User · Answer

For tortoise git users  at a scale of hundreds tags  you can delete multiple tags at once using UI  but the UI is well hidden under context menu  From explorer windows right click - gt  Browse references - gt  Right click on ref refmotes name - gt  choose  Delete remote tags   See https   tortoisegit org docs tortoisegit tgit-dug-browse-ref html

User · Answer

If you have a tag created starting with the   character  e g   ST002  you might find that u are unable to delete using normal patterns  i e   git tag -d  STOO2   Will not delete the tag  but wrapping it in a String Literal like so  git tag -d   ST002  or git tag -d   ST002    That will get it deleted  Hoping it will help someone who made the mistake of using   to write tag names

User · Answer

Seems like a lot of work for something xargs already does  Looking back through this thread  I m guessing the slowness with xargs that you experienced is because the original answer used xargs -n 1 when it didn t really need to   This is equivalent to your method one except that xargs automatically deals with the maximum command line length   git tag   sorting processing etc   xargs git push --delete origin   xargs can run processes in parallel too  Method 2 with xargs   git tag   sorting processing etc   xargs -P 5 -n 100 git push --delete origin   The above uses a maximum of 5 processes to handle a maximum of 100 arguments in each process  You can experiment with the arguments to find what works best for your needs

User · Answer

To delete a tag on your remote repository  you can use git push  lt remote gt   refs tags  lt tagname gt   The way to interpret the above is to read it as the null value  the value before the colon is being pushed to remote tag name

User · Answer

As  CubanX suggested  I ve split this answer from my original  Here is a method which is several times faster than xargs and may scale much more with tweaking  It uses the Github API  a personal access token  and leverages the utility parallel  git tag   sorting processing etc   parallel --jobs 2 curl -i -X DELETE    https   api github com repos My Account my repo git refs tags    -H    quot authorization  token GIT OAUTH OR PERSONAL KEY HERE  quot     -H   quot cache-control  no-cache  quot    parallel has many operating modes  but generally parallelizes any command you give it while allowing you to set limits on the number of processes  You can alter the --jobs 2 parameter to allow faster operation  but I had problems with Github s rate limits  which are currently 5000 hr  but also seems to have an undocumented short-term limit as well   After this  you ll probably want to delete your local tags too  This is much faster so we can go back to using xargs and git tag -d  which is sufficient  git tag   sorting processing etc   xargs -L 1 git tag -d

User · Answer

Delete local tag  12345   git tag -d 12345   Delete remote tag  12345   eg  GitHub version too   git push origin  refs tags 12345   alternative approach  git push --delete origin tagName git tag -d tagName

User · Answer

Simple script to remove given tag from both local and origin locations  With a check if tag really exists   if     git tag -l   1      then     git tag --delete   1     git push --delete origin  1      echo done  else     echo tag named   1  was not found fi   How to use    Create shell script file  e g  git-tag-purge sh  and paste content  chmod your script file to make it executable  Make the script globally available cd to your git project Call script  e g    git-tag-purge sh tag name

User · Answer

Just wanted to share an alias I created which does the same thing  Add the following to your    gitconfig  alias      delete-tag    quot  f                   echo  deleting tag   1  from remote origin ausing command  git push --delete origin tagName                  git push --delete origin  1                echo  deleting tag   1  from local using command  git tag -d tagName                  git tag -d  1               f quot   The usage looks like  -- gt git delete-tag v1 0-DeleteMe deleting tag v1 0-DeleteMe from remote origin ausing command  git push --delete origin tagName  To https   github com jsticha pafs  -  deleted              v1 0-DeleteMe deleting tag v1 0-DeleteMe from local using command  git tag -d tagName  Deleted tag  v1 0-DeleteMe   was 300d3ef22

User · Answer

If you have created a tag called release01 in a Git repository you would remove it from your repository by doing the following   git tag -d release01  git push origin  refs tags release01    To remove one from a Mercurial repository   hg tag --remove featurefoo   Please reference https   confluence atlassian com pages viewpage action pageId 282175551

User · Answer

To remove the tag from the remote repository   git push --delete origin TAGNAME   You may also want to delete the tag locally   git tag -d TAGNAME

User · Answer

You can push an  empty  reference to the remote tag name  git push origin  tagname  Or  more expressively  use the --delete option  or -d if your git version is older than 1 8 0   git push --delete origin tagname  Note that git has tag namespace and branch namespace so you may use the same name for a branch and for a tag  If you want to make sure that you cannot accidentally remove the branch instead of the tag  you can specify full ref which will never delete a branch  git push origin  refs tags tagname  If you also need to delete the local tag  use  git tag --delete tagname   Background Pushing a branch  tag  or other ref to a remote repository involves specifying  quot which repo  what source  what destination  quot  git push remote-repo source-ref destination-ref  A real world example where you push your master branch to the origin s master branch is  git push origin refs heads master refs heads master  Which because of default paths  can be shortened to  git push origin master master  Tags work the same way  git push origin refs tags release-1 0 refs tags release-1 0  Which can also be shortened to  git push origin release-1 0 release-1 0  By omitting the source ref  the part before the colon   you push  nothing  to the destination  deleting the ref on the remote end

User · Answer

git push --delete origin  TAGNAME is the correct approach  in addition of a local delete   But  make sure to use Git 2 31   quot git push  there --delete quot  man  should have been diagnosed as an error  but instead turned into a matching push  which has been corrected with Git 2 31  Q1 2021   See commit 20e4164  23 Feb 2021  by Junio C Hamano  gitster    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 1400458  25 Feb 2021   push  do not turn --delete    into a matching push Noticed-by  Tilman Vogel   When we added a syntax sugar  quot git push remote --delete quot  man   lt ref gt  to  quot git push quot  man  as a synonym to the canonical git push remote man    syntax at f517f1f   quot builtin-push  add man  --delete as syntactic sugar for  foo quot   2009-12-30  Git v1 7 0-rc0 -- merge   we weren t careful enough to make sure that  lt ref gt  is not empty  Blindly rewriting  quot --delete  quot  to  quot   quot  means that an empty string  lt ref gt  results in refspec  quot   quot   which is the syntax to ask for  quot matching quot  push that does not delete anything  Worse yet  if there were matching refs that can be fast-forwarded  they would have been published prematurely  even if the user feels that they are not ready yet to be pushed out  which would be a real disaster

User · Answer

git tag -d your tag name git push origin  refs tags your tag name  The first line deletes your tag name from local repo and second line deletes your tag name from remote repo  For those who use GitHub  one more step is needed  discarding draft

User · Answer

A more straightforward way is   git push --delete origin YOUR TAG NAME   IMO prefixing colon syntax is a little bit odd in this situation

User · Answer

Just notice that  if you have a remote branch named as a remote tag  these commands are ambiguous   git push origin  tagname git push --delete origin tagname   So you must use this command to delete the tag   git push origin  refs tags  lt tag gt    and this one to delete the branch   git push origin  refs heads  lt branch gt    If not  you would get an error like this   error  dst refspec  lt tagname gt  matches more than one  error  failed to push some refs to   lt repo gt

User · Answer

If you use SourceTree - a great Git GUI - then you can easily do this without the command line by doing the following    Open your repository in SourceTree Select and expand the  Tags  tab on the left Right-Click on the tag you want deleted Select  Delete YOUR TAG NAME  In the verification window  select  Remove Tag From Remotes    YOUR TAG NAME will now be removed from your local repository and all remotes - be it GitHub  BitBucket  or wherever else you listed as a remote for that repository   Also  if you deleted a tag locally but not on the remote origins  and you want to delete it everywhere  then just create a new tag that has the same name and is attached at the same commit as the origins  Then  repeat the steps above to delete everywhere

User · Answer

Here is a local testcase to test it locally without messing with a remote     p   mkdir gittest       p git   cd gittest    p gittest   git init Initialized empty Git repository in  Users local user p gittest  git     p gittest   touch testfile txt    p gittest   git add testfile txt    p gittest   git commit -m  initial commit   master  root-commit  912ce0e  initial commit  1 file changed  0 insertions     0 deletions -   create mode 100644 testfile txt    p gittest   git tag    p gittest   git tag -a testtag    p gittest   git tag testtag    p gittest   git show-ref 912ce0e40635c90241fdab756dce7ea34938de57 refs heads master b0a6c15cabb990e6d6c46f762891b63608d962f3 refs tags testtag    p gittest   cd       p   mkdir gitbare    p   cd gitbare    p gitbare   git init --bare Initialized empty Git repository in  Users local user p gitbare     p gitbare   cd       p   cd gittest     p gittest   git remote add origin  Users local user p gitbare    p gittest   git push -u origin master Counting objects  3  done  Writing objects  100   3 3   215 bytes   215 00 KiB s  done  Total 3  delta 0   reused 0  delta 0  To  Users local user p gitbare     new branch       master - gt  master Branch  master  set up to track remote branch  master  from  origin      p gittest   git push origin testtag Counting objects  1  done  Writing objects  100   1 1   163 bytes   163 00 KiB s  done  Total 1  delta 0   reused 0  delta 0  To  Users local user p gitbare     new tag          testtag - gt  testtag    p gittest   git show-ref 912ce0e40635c90241fdab756dce7ea34938de57 refs heads master 912ce0e40635c90241fdab756dce7ea34938de57 refs remotes origin master b0a6c15cabb990e6d6c46f762891b63608d962f3 refs tags testtag    p gittest   git push -d origin testtag To  Users local user p gitbare  -  deleted          testtag    p gittest       git tag -d testtag Deleted tag  testtag   was b0a6c15     p gittest   git show-ref 912ce0e40635c90241fdab756dce7ea34938de57 refs heads master 912ce0e40635c90241fdab756dce7ea34938de57 refs remotes origin master    p gittest

[git] How to delete a remote tag?

Up to 100x faster method for thousands of remote tags

This first method is by far the fastest, maybe 20 to 100 times faster than using `xargs`, and works with a least several thousand tags at a time.

Method two is broken out as a separate answer elsewhere on this same page

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-tag

[git] How to delete a remote tag?

Up to 100x faster method for thousands of remote tags

This first method is by far the fastest, maybe 20 to 100 times faster than using xargs, and works with a least several thousand tags at a time.

Method two is broken out as a separate answer elsewhere on this same page

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-tag

This first method is by far the fastest, maybe 20 to 100 times faster than using `xargs`, and works with a least several thousand tags at a time.