Git Auto Tagging With PHP Deployer

Adding a git tag when deploying is useful when tracking down issues in previous releases. You just need to create a relevant git tagging task, which would look something like this.

task('git:tag:push', function () {
  // Generate the tag, here we are using the current timestamp.
  $tag = date('d-m-Y-Hi');
  
  $tagOutput = runLocally("git tag " . $tag);
  writeln($tagOutput);
  
  $pushOutput = runLocally("git push origin " . $tag);
  writeln($pushOutput);
  info('Tag created.');
});

The $tag variable here is up to you. You could even get the current release name from the release history.

$tag = get('release_name');

Be careful when using this method as it can lead to duplicate tags on new hosts. This is easily fixed by changing the value in the file ".dep/latest_release" in your release server.

Then, it's just a case of adding this to your deploy tasks.

task('deploy', [
  'git:tag:push',
  // Etc...
]);

With this in place, the current state of the target branch is tagged before being released.