I am trying to delete git tags that are older than X months
We have release tags that we need to retain, they are all tagged release-* where * = date
I know how to delete a singular tag git push origin :refs/tags/<tagName>
So I extrapolated to get all the remote tags to delete them
git ls-remote --tags origin | xargs git push origin :$1
To skip the release tags I was planning on using egrep -v making the command
git ls-remote --tags origin | egrep -v "(^\*|release*)" | xargs git push origin :$1
But I still haven't figured out how to do it by date.
Locally I can order things by date like so git for-each-ref --sort=taggerdate --format '%(refname)' refs/tags | egrep -v "(^\*|release*)" but that does not help me with remote tags.
If it helps I don't mind deleted or not deleting local tags in order to delete the remote ones.
Finally we use gitlab if it provides a better way of cleanup?
Regardless this needs to be something that can be run like a script through Jenkins to help with our git cleanup needs.
Update
Since we have thousand of git tags I realized that xargs is going to be rather slow.
I believe the way to delete will more likely be something like
git push origin $(< git tag | <sorting_by_date + exclude release> \
| sed -e 's/^/:/' | paste -sd " ")
That way the command will basically be appending :refs/tags/tag1 :refs/tags/tag2 into a single command instead of doing a unique delete for every tag and contacting the remote.
After working on this for the past couple of days I figured out a solution that works quite well.
First collect all the git tags by chronological order, I excluded release* tags
git for-each-ref --sort=taggerdate --format '%(refname:short) %(taggerdate:short)' refs/tags | egrep -v "(^\*|release*)"
This will give the following output
master_7 2017-12-05
master_8 2017-12-05
master_9 2017-12-07
master_10 2017-12-08
master_11 2017-12-08
update_framework_1 2017-12-12
master_12 2017-12-12
master_13 2017-12-13
So it's the name of the tag separated by a space and then the date in YYYY-MM-DD format. If you want a full date or something specific update taggerdate:short with something appropriate.
I then took the output and processed it line by line looking at the date and comparing it with my cut off date.
This allowed me to generate a list of tags to delete.
Then I run the deletions by looping through the tag list and performing the following command
git push origin :refs/tags/<tag1> :refs/tags/<tag2>
I played it safe and run the command every 50 tags, but git didn't seem to have any problems with this.
Finally after all the deletions are complete I run
git fetch --prune origin +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/* which deletes all local tags that do not exist in the remote.
And there you have it all tags are cleaned up.