Getting latest tag on git repository

get-latest-tag-on-git.sh

# The command finds the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit.
# If the tag points to the commit, then only the tag is shown.
# Otherwise, it suffixes the tag name with the number of additional commits on top of the tagged object 
# and the abbreviated object name of the most recent commit.
git describe

# With --abbrev set to 0, the command can be used to find the closest tagname without any suffix:
git describe --abbrev=0

# other examples
git describe --abbrev=0 --tags # gets tag from current branch
git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1` # gets tags across all branches, not just the current branch

References on Stackoverflow

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1404796/how-to-get-the-latest-tag-name-in-current-branch-in-git
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4277773/how-to-get-latest-tag-name
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17414104/git-checkout-latest-tag

Copied from https://gist.github.com/rponte/fdc0724dd984088606b0#gistcomment-1570525