deployment - Checking out Git tag leads to "detached HEAD state"

Question

I'm developing a deployment script for my git project and I just started using tags. I've added a new tag called v2.0:

git tag -a v2.0 -m "Launching version 2.0"

And I've pushed this tag to the remote repository

git push --tags

When I try to execute the deployment script and check out the v2.0 tag I get this message:

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout. If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example: git checkout -b new_branch_name HEAD is now at

Is that normal? The repository is in limbo because if I do:

git branch

I get this output:

* (no branch)
  master

Sorry if this is obvious but I couldn't figure it out.

Answer 1

Okay, first a few terms slightly oversimplified.

In git, a tag (like many other things) is what's called a treeish. It's a way of referring to a point in in the history of the project. Treeishes can be a tag, a commit, a date specifier, an ordinal specifier or many other things.

Now a branch is just like a tag but is movable. When you are "on" a branch and make a commit, the branch is moved to the new commit you made indicating it's current position.

Your HEAD is pointer to a branch which is considered "current". Usually when you clone a repository, HEAD will point to master which in turn will point to a commit. When you then do something like git checkout experimental, you switch the HEAD to point to the experimental branch which might point to a different commit.

Now the explanation.

When you do a git checkout v2.0, you are switching to a commit that is not pointed to by a branch. The HEAD is now "detached" and not pointing to a branch. If you decide to make a commit now (as you may), there's no branch pointer to update to track this commit. Switching back to another commit will make you lose this new commit you've made. That's what the message is telling you.

Usually, what you can do is to say git checkout -b v2.0-fixes v2.0. This will create a new branch pointer at the commit pointed to by the treeish v2.0 (a tag in this case) and then shift your HEAD to point to that. Now, if you make commits, it will be possible to track them (using the v2.0-fixes branch) and you can work like you usually would. There's nothing "wrong" with what you've done especially if you just want to take a look at the v2.0 code. If however, you want to make any alterations there which you want to track, you'll need a branch.

You should spend some time understanding the whole DAG model of git. It's surprisingly simple and makes all the commands quite clear.