Intro
Most of the comments I read online about git submodules go from:
"avoid them"
"never use submodules"
"use one big repo"
And after working with them for a year now I can understand why.
I would myself suggest to stay away from submodules, as they are not exactly immediate to understand and not a nice thing to maintain either.
That said, submodules can be useful at times.
For example:
- You could have multiple repositories to which you want to provide the same developer scripts. One way of achieving this could be to have them live in a separate repository and add this as a submodule.
- You have a very tight relationship between two repos, but at the same time you do not want (or can't) use a monorepo.
Submodules in a Nutshell
If you do not know what submodules are, they are simply links to a specific commit in another repository.
That's where the trick is.
Read again:
They are not links to another repository, they are links to a specific commit in another repository.
Let's imagine the current scenario:
- We have repository_a and repository_b
- We create a submodule of repository_b inside repository_a
- All works good, we can see repository_a in Git and it gets pulled together with repository_b.
At some point, we might make a change inside repository_b.
We then fetch/pull inside repository_a, and surprise: the change is not there.
That's because, again, submodules point to a specific commit.
The process to update a submodule is quite straight forward:
cd repository_a
git submodule update --remote --recursive
Great! The submodule is now updated and we see the latest changes we pushed to repository_b.
What about doing this every day, every time there's a change in repository_b?
What if repository_b is a submodule in 10/20/30 repositories?
Too much work.
Submoduler
That's where Submoduler comes in.
Submoduler is a simple Python app that can run in a Docker Container, and loops a list of repositories provided by the user to update all of their submodules in an automatic fashion.
You can find it here:
https://github.com/ginwakeup/submoduler
You can using by quickly pulling the Docker Image and running it with a simple configuration.yaml in which you can list the repositories to be updated as https urls together with options, and then run it passing a user and pat through the -env flag.
Hopefully this will be of some help to someone!
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