View Git Tags with Semver Ordering

If you’re like me, you wish all Git tags adhered to the Semantic Versioning standard. Unfortunately, Semver is just a convention, so Git tags can basically be any string of text. By default when you use the git tag command, your output will be in alphabetical order. Being a gopher, almost all the projects I work on are tagged according to Semver standards, which means the default output is fairly useless.

To print all the Git tags in a project in Semver order, simply run git tag -l | sort -V.

Alternatively, if you’re on at least version 2 of Git, you won’t even need to use the sort command, just run:

git tag -l --sort=version:refname

If you want the latest tags at the top of the output, use -version to inverse the sort:

git tag -l --sort=-version:refname

If you want your global installation of Git to default to Semver sorting, you can use the following command as of Git v2.1+:

git config --global tag.sort version:refname

Examples of Git standard output

Default alphabetical sorting

v0.0.0
v0.0.1
v0.0.12
v0.0.2
v0.1.0
v0.10.0
v1.0.0
v1.1.1
v1.11.0
v1.12.0
v10.0.0
v2.0.0

Semver sorting

v0.0.0
v0.0.1
v0.0.2
v0.0.12
v0.1.0
v0.10.0
v1.0.0
v1.1.1
v1.11.0
v1.12.0
v2.0.0
v10.0.0

If all this weird tag stuff is going over your head, you might want to check out ThePrimeagen’s full Git course here.