Question

I’m new to GIT and am struggling with it. I’ve got a website that is stored in a repository. The website requires a theme folder that is setup as a separate repository.

I’ve used the git submodule add command successfully to add the theme repository to my website.

So now I have a website repro with a theme child repro. The files for the submodule are showing inside my website folder.

I’m trying to push the entire main website repro to a remote server which works but the files of the theme (submodule) are not pushed.

Answer 1

The submodule is very much like an independent respository – it knows nothing about whether it’s been included as a submodule in the parent repository. The parent repository doesn’t know that much about the submodule either – just where it should be in the tree, what commit the submodule should be at and what URL to initially clone it from…

I don’t think there’s a command that will push all your submodules for you – the sequence of events when you update some files in the submodule should be:

 cd theme

 # [Change or add some files, etc.]

 # Now commit those changes:
 git commit -a

 # Push them to the origin repository, assuming you're on the master branch:
 git push origin master

 # Change up to the parent repository:
 cd ..

 # Create a commit with the new version of that submodule:
 git add theme
 git commit -m "Committing a new version of the theme submodule"

 # Now push the commit that includes a pointer to the new submodule
 # version in the parent repository:
 git push origin master

The typical problem here is pushing a commit in the parent repository that references a submodule version that you haven’t yet pushed from the submodule version. You may find it helpful to create a script so that you don’t forget any of those steps.