Continue looping over submodules with the "git submodule foreach" command after a non-zero exit

Question

I have a project that contains many submodules. I want to loop over each submodule with the following command:

git submodule foreach npm install

And I want the script to continue looping over each submodule even if one submodule returns an error (non zero return code). Currently, a non-zero return code from running this command in any submodule will cause git to stop looping over the remaining submodules.

Any recommendations on how to accomplish this?

Multipurpose

git submodule foreach 'yarn' – Laissezfaire

Answer 1

Just make your command always return a 0 code like so:

git submodule foreach 'npm install || :'

This is taken from the manual: git help submodule:

   foreach
       Evaluates an arbitrary shell command in each checked out submodule.
       The command has access to the variables $name, $path, $sha1 and
       $toplevel: $name is the name of the relevant submodule section in
       .gitmodules, $path is the name of the submodule directory relative
       to the superproject, $sha1 is the commit as recorded in the
       superproject, and $toplevel is the absolute path to the top-level
       of the superproject. Any submodules defined in the superproject but
       not checked out are ignored by this command. Unless given --quiet,
       foreach prints the name of each submodule before evaluating the
       command. If --recursive is given, submodules are traversed
       recursively (i.e. the given shell command is evaluated in nested
       submodules as well). A non-zero return from the command in any
       submodule causes the processing to terminate. This can be
       overridden by adding || : to the end of the command.

       As an example, git submodule foreach 'echo $path `git rev-parse
       HEAD`' will show the path and currently checked out commit for each
       submodule.

The command : from help : in bash:

:: :
    Null command.

    No effect; the command does nothing.

    Exit Status:
    Always succeeds.

Always succeeds :)

Rothberg

git submodule foreach 'npm install || true' would do the same. – Monovalent

It doesn't work on Windows. Was supposed to? Even using bash the `<command>` only try to execute the first one and breaks anyway. – Thoroughfare

@MarceloFilho: Try using the git bash. – Thibaud

Using git bash @MaBe... :/ – Thoroughfare

@MarceloFilho: please open a new question, describing the problem (so that it is reproducible by everybody), and link this question. – Rothberg

On Mac use " instead of ' – Palmapalmaceous

Using an EC2 with Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS, || true failed for me, but || : worked like a charm... Thank you @Rothberg – Biweekly

Answer 2

In windows batch, you can set the return code to 0 by adding an ampersand and another command that does nothing:

git submodule foreach "npm install & echo done"

edit: originally the answer was using a semicolon to do this, which was incorrect.

Consonant

Yeah, that's the part that the Git docs completely ignore: non-POSIX shells. +1 – Cyclades

Answer 3

You could see this topic.

I don't use GIT, but if you can locate the .gitmodules files, it may be easy to loop for each submodules :

<command to find all of your submodules>|while read; do
    # ... (default use $REPLY as an item)
done

Or :

while read; do
    # ...
done <<< "$(command to find all of your submodules)"

See this reminder on how to read a command output with a loop in Bash.

Shutt

Please don't "parse" .gitmodules using shell ... there's a way to do it and that's: git config --file .gitmodules --get-regexp <regexp> ... which could indeed be piped into while then. – Cyclades

@Cyclades this answer is +10 years old ;) (since, I became very used to use git)... – Shutt