Sorting tags from a Git repo using semantic versioning

A quick post today to tell you about a recent discovery in Git's sorting functions and tags based on semantic versioning.

By default, if you run the git tag -l command, Git will do an alphabetical sort.

However, this sorting gives confusing results when the tags use semantic versioning notation.

git tag -l
v2.6.1
v2.6.10
v2.6.11
v2.6.12
v2.6.2
v2.6.3
v2.6.4
v2.6.5
v2.6.6
v2.6.7
v2.6.8
v2.6.9
v2.7.0

Notice here the sequence v2.6.10, v2.6.11 and v2.6.12 which is interposed between version v2.6.1 and v2.6.2.

To solve this problem, it is possible to use the --sort function with the version attribute in Git.

git tag --sort=version:refname

This will display the sorted results consistently:

git tag --sort=version:refname
v2.6.1
v2.6.2
v2.6.3
v2.6.4
v2.6.5
v2.6.6
v2.6.7
v2.6.8
v2.6.9
v2.6.10
v2.6.11
v2.6.12
v2.7.0