badges/shields · info · NotFound

no tags found

Error message

no tags found

What it means

The GitLab tag service throws this NotFound when the repository has no tags at all. Since sorting (e.g. by date, date+semver) requires at least one tag, an empty list produces a 'no tags found' badge.

Source

Thrown at services/gitlab/gitlab-tag.service.js:81

  async fetch({ project, baseUrl }) {
    // https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/tags.html
    // N.B. the documentation has contradictory information about default sort order.
    // As of 2020-10-11 the default is by date, but we add the `order_by` query param
    // explicitly in case that changes upstream.
    return super.fetch({
      schema,
      url: `${baseUrl}/api/v4/projects/${encodeURIComponent(
        project,
      )}/repository/tags`,
      options: { searchParams: { order_by: 'updated' } },
      httpErrors: httpErrorsFor('project not found'),
    })
  }

  static transform({ tags, sort, includePrereleases }) {
    if (tags.length === 0) {
      throw new NotFound({ prettyMessage: 'no tags found' })
    }

    if (sort === 'date') {
      return tags[0].name
    }

    return latest(
      tags.map(t => t.name),
      { pre: includePrereleases },
    )
  }

  async handle(
    { project },
    {
      gitlab_url: baseUrl = 'https://gitlab.com',
      include_prereleases: pre,
      sort,

View on GitHub (pinned to 766fd8bc89)

Solutions

  1. Create and push a tag (git tag v1.0.0 && git push origin v1.0.0)
  2. Verify the project path in the badge URL refers to the correct repository
  3. If tags are intentionally absent, remove the tag/version badge
Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

const tags = await (await fetch(`https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/${encodeURIComponent(project)}/repository/tags`)).json()
if (!Array.isArray(tags) || tags.length === 0) console.warn('Repository has no tags')

Type guard

const hasTags = (t) => Array.isArray(t) && t.length > 0

Try / catch

try {
  const value = GitlabTag.transform({ tags, sort, includePrereleases })
} catch (e) {
  if (e.prettyMessage === 'no tags found') {
    // show 'untagged' or omit badge
  } else throw e
}

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: Requesting the GitLab tag badge for a repository where the maintainers never ran git push --tags or created any tag; or the project uses releases-only versioning without tags.

Common situations: Brand-new repositories; projects that version only via package metadata and never tag; wrong project path in the badge URL pointing to a tagless repo.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of badges/shields@766fd8bc89 (2026-08-30). Data as JSON: /api/errors/e6dfd4899dcdfa78. Report an issue: GitHub.