git describe fails with “fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything.”

Question

I\'m using git 1.7.1 on Ubuntu 10.10 amd64, and I\'m trying to extract the hash of my repository HEAD to use it in an automated version information that I compile into my pr

Answer 1

I have had this problem in a CI build environment where the CI tool was performing a shallow clone of the repository. This was frustrating, because in my development environment, the command

git describe --tags

would give me output like

2.2.12-7-g8ec9d6c9

whereas in the build environment I would get the "fatal no names found" error. If I tried using the --always tag

git describe --tags --always

then I would simply get the hash of the latest commit, but not the most recent tag prior to that commit

8ec9d6c9

Performing a git pull in the build environment wouldn't help, because once the repo has been cloned shallowly, future pulls will not update the tags.

The solution was to ensure that the initial clone of the repo in the build environment was not a shallow clone (i.e. the git clone command was not used with --depth, --shallow-since or --shallow-exclude parameters).