8.5 Using Git Submodules to Track External Repositories

Pragmatic Version Control — Pragmatic Programmers (64 / 103)

👈 8.4 Tracking Multiple Projects | TOC | Chapter 9 Beyond the Basics 👉

Sometimes you need to track multiple repositories as if they’re all in the same repository. This might be because of a dependency on some third-party library or possibly because your in-house project has been divided into multiple projects to help make them more manageable.

Git allows you to track external repositories through what it calls submodules. These allow you to store a repository within another repository while keeping the two histories completely independent. Those coming from a Subversion background might recognize these as svn:externals.

Let’s demonstrate this behavior. First we need to create a new repository that will house our submodule repository. Let’s create a repository called magic:

With this empty repository initialized, you can use git submodule to view the submodules associated with this repository:

Since there are no submodules defined yet, it doesn’t return anything. Adding a new submodule is straightforward. You use the git submodule add command. It has two required parameters. The first is the repository; the second is the path where you want to store the repository.

For example, let’s add the hocus repository—a small repository hosted on GitHub that I created to use for the book. And to keep things clear, let’s put it in the hocus directory. You can use the command on one line without the \; those are here to make the command fit on the page:

Now when you rerun git submodule, hocus is displayed:

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