Git submodule inside of a submodule (nested submodules)

Question

Is it possible for a git submodule to be made of several other git submodules, and the super git repo to fetch the contents for each submodule?

I have tried to do this using the obvious/naive approach of creating a git repo holding several submodules.

Then adding this git repo to another git repo as a submodule.

Then attempting to pull from the root directory of the super git repo by git submodule init and then git submodule update. But this fails to fetch the sub-submodules.

Heywood

I suggest that you use TortoiseGit -- use it in your root and then ask it to update all submodules with Initialize, Recursive, Force checked ! – Frumpy

Answer 1

As mentioned in Retrospectively add --recursive to a git repo

git submodule update --init --recursive

should work.

Larva

This worked for me. Note that I erroneously thought that git submodule init; git submodule update --recursive was synonymous with the above, but it is not. – Notch

+1 I like this much better than what I was using: git submodule foreach git submodule init ... then git submodule update --recursive – Interweave

Unfortunately this didn't work for me. No erros, no messages, nothing. – Monostome

How do you update theses fully nested repos though? When I pass in the --init flag, the submodules, within one of my submodules, just get initialized to old versions, not the most current ones. – Perla

I do git submodule foreach git pull origin master, and it works partially: submodules are updated, but sometimes the HEAD gets detached and for submodules within submodules, I can't commit my direct submodule's changes because it has "modified content" not "new commits" (since its own submodules have "new commits" and are updated). – Perla

You can also add --remote to this command if you'd like to fetch from a specific branch: git submodule update --init --recursive --remote – Royall

Answer 2

As Sridhar comments below, from Git1.6.5+, git clone --recursive is now the official alternative, described in:

• "git clone --submodule"
• "Retrospectively add --recursive to a git repo"
  (with the alias $ git config --global alias.cloner = 'clone --recursive', which avoids shadowing the normal git clone command)

inamiy correctly points out the git submodule update --init --recursive command, introduced in commit b13fd5c, again in git1.6.5, by Johan Herland (jherland).

And IceFire adds in the comments:

If you would like to checkout only one submodule of a submodule, then
git submodule update --init <submoduleName> is the way to go.

---

(older original answer)

According to the manual page

 git submodule update --recursive

should update any nested submodules. But the init part may not be recursive.

Depending on your version of Git, you could fall back to a more "scripting" approach, with this article Recursively Updating Git Submodules which allows for recursive init and update:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Cwd;

init_and_update();

exit;

sub init_and_update
{
    my $start_path = cwd();

    my %paths;
    my $updated;

    do
    {
        my $data = `find . -name '.gitmodules'`;
        chomp($data);

        $data =~ s/\/\.gitmodules//g;

        foreach my $path (split(/\n/, $data))
        {
            $paths{$path} = '' if($paths{$path} eq '');
        }

        $updated = 0;

        foreach my $path (sort keys %paths)
        {
            if($paths{$path} eq '')
            {
                chdir($path);
                `git submodule init 2>&1`;
                `git submodule update 2>&1`;
                chdir($start_path);

                if($ARGV[0] eq '--remove-gitmodules')
                {
                    unlink("$path/.gitmodules");
                }

                $paths{$path} = 1;

                $updated++;
            }
        }
    } while($updated);
}

Needlepoint

Is not git clone --recursive sufficient? – Muttonchops

@Sridhar: it is, for cloning, as mentioned in https://mcmap.net/q/13651/-how-do-i-quot-git-clone-quot-a-repo-including-its-submodules and #4252440, from Git1.6.5 and later. I have edited my answer to reflect that. – Needlepoint

Note: If you would like to checkout only one submodule of a submodule, then git submodule update --init <submoduleName> is the way to go; I got here when searching for this answer – Palla

@Palla Thank you. I have included your comment in the answer for more visibility. – Needlepoint