Git on Artur Rios Lab

Git Tags: Naming the Commits That Matter

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Branches move: every commit on main moves main forward. Sometimes you need a name that stays where it is put, such as “the commit that went out as version 1.6.0”. That is a tag. Tags mark releases, the build a bug report refers to, or the last commit before a large refactor, and almost every release tool, from GitHub Releases to package registries, reads them.

Tags look simple, and mostly are. The parts that cause trouble are the two kinds of tag, which behave differently in some commands, and the fact that tags are not pushed, fetched or overwritten the way branches are. This article covers both. The commands shown were run with Git 2.56 on 21 October 2026, in a scratch repository and in this site’s own repository. Long temporary paths in the output are left out.

Git Submodules: One Repository Pinned Inside Another

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:00:00 +0000

This site is built with a Hugo theme I also maintain, nuno, and the theme lives in its own repository. The site needs an exact version of it, and I want to change the theme without copying files back and forth. Git’s answer is a submodule: a repository placed inside another repository, the superproject, which records exactly which commit of it to use. The site’s themes/nuno folder is one, and it is the example throughout this article.

My Git Config and the Commands I Keep Reaching For

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

This page is a reference rather than an article: the global configuration I set on every new machine, and the commands I look up often enough to keep written down. Each one comes with what it actually does and, where it rewrites history or throws work away, what to watch out for. Every command here was run against Git 2.56 on 21 October 2026, and the explanations follow the official Git reference pages linked at the end.