Commits, Branches, and Tags — What You Need to Know!

To succeed with source code management in Git, one must understand how commits, branches, and tags interplay; these are all core components that make up your source code history.

Having read this post, you'll understand how they differ — conceptually as well as technically!

Before we dive into the details, let's brush up with this overview of a local repository to level the playing field.

As you can see above, each component is technically either an object or a reference, with the tag being the odd one out as it can be created either as an object or reference. Being aware of the differences between an object and a reference makes your life with Git much easier, so here it goes.