Comments on: Git clone vs Git submodule

By: Mike Zazaian

Mike Zazaian — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:19:14 +0000

Thanks for the great tutorial! Here's another article about submodules that extends a little bit on this functionality:

http://doblock.com/articles/using-git-submodules-to-manage-plugins-in-rails

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:34:09 +0000

git submodules are handy. So is git-svn. Can the two play nice or do you need an intermediate
git-svn repository?

i.e. I'm running a git project A. I want to track an external project, a django plugin say, as a submodule of A. But that external project uses svn repo X. Do I need to make a git repo B that tracks X with git-svn, then track B as a submodule of A, or can I track X in A without an explicit repo B ?

By: Edward Spencer

Edward Spencer — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:39:00 +0000

@Anonymous yes that’s correct – cd into the submodule’s directory and do a git pull. You’ll then need to cd into your main repo’s directory, add your changes using git add, commit and push.

When someone else pulls next, they can run git submodule update which will update their submodules to the version you just pulled.

If you had added a new submodule, the other person would need to run git submodule init again before git submodule update.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:24:00 +0000

Thanks for posting this… so now if you want to update the submodules to newer revs, do I simply do a ‘git pull’ in them and then commit in the super-tree to get new refs for them stored in the index?

By: falker911

falker911 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:29:00 +0000

Thanks for the article.

By: Edward Spencer

Edward Spencer — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:14:00 +0000

@Matt glad it helped

@kain clone is the default way of checking out a repository instance but submodule does a fairly similar thing. I guess I thought that too obvious to mention what clone does and just concentrate on the differences. Sorry about that, does it make more sense now?

By: kain

kain — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:54:00 +0000

and where’s the “vs” git clone in this article?

By: Matt Jones

Matt Jones — Thu, 22 May 2008 02:35:00 +0000

Great post! This really helped out a lot in understanding how to migrate to git from svn. I had been using svn:externals, and the git submodule approach does seem a lot better!