Question

I’m somewhat of a git newb so please bear with me here. I have a project that has a submodule that needs to be refreshed.

The project is using version 1 of the submodule and there are changes so I want to bump it to use the latest version.

How do I refresh the submodule and apply the changes so other users who clone or pulling from the project will use the latest updated version 1.5?

Here’s how the project looks:

ProjectA: remote repo configured to repoA
It relies on a submodule that points to repoB.

The .git/config file in the project root directory looks like:

[remote "origin"]
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
        url = git@/github.com/foo/foo.git

There is also .gitmodules file in the project root directory:

[submodule "Vendor/some-external-library"]
        path = Vendor/some-external-library
        url = https://github.com/some-external-library/some-external-library.git

Within ‘some-external-library’ directory, there is no .gitmodules file, just the standard .git directory with the appropriate files. .git/config points to repoB.

Answer 1

Submodules are actually git repos that are checked out inside your main repo, and your main repo knows stuff about them, like which commit they have checked out.

So, what you probably want to do is go to the folder of the sumbodule and go git pull origin master(or the commit you want to pull instead of master) and then do a commit that set reflects this change(the change on the submodule) on your main repo

In short:

cd submodule_dir
git pull origin master
cd main_dir
git add submodule_dir
git commit

You can also do git submodule foreach git pull to update all the submodules references at on time, but that’s probably a bad idea regarding repo mantainability.

More info at git help submodule