How do I find a tag that contains a commit?

Question

I have the SHA ID of a commit that I am interested in and would like to know how to find the first tag that contains it.

Answer 1

git describe --contains $committish shows a reference to the commit built on a tag plus a ~$n ancestorhood count, so the following command shows the most recent tag that contains a commit:

git describe --contains "$committish" | sed 's/~.*//'

If there is no tag that contains this commit, git describe will fail. If you'd like to get the (abbreviated) committish instead, add the --always option.