My parent project has a couple of submodules added to it.
For deployment purposes, I want to checkout a specific branch eg master, staging, etc in each submodule and pull the latest commit of this branch in each submodule.
I've checked various answers on SO like the following:
But it's very much confusing as to what is the best practice in 2022. I've git version 2.30.1 (Apple Git-130)
So far I've understood that this command can be used to fetch the latest commit (from their respective remotes) of the branch already mentioned in .gitmodules file.
git submodule update --remote --merge
But how exactly do I use the -b option in order to switch the branches in all submodules at the same time, for diff environments deployment?
I figured out a solution that worked for me.
Simple Solution
git submodule foreach <command>
The above command will run for each submodule.
So I ran the following 2 commands to checkout out desired branch and pull latest commit in each submodule
git submodule foreach git checkout -B staging origin/staging
git submodule foreach git pull --rebase
Complex Solution
The following command updated the target branch in the .gitmodules file
git config -f .gitmodules submodule.<submodule_path>.branch <target_branch_name>
I used the following command for the batch update for all submodules
git submodule status | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs -I {} git config -f .gitmodules submodule.{}.branch master
Then the following command pulled(fetched & merged) the latest commits of the respective remotes of each submodule
git submodule update --remote --merge
--merge alternatives:
--merge will do a hard reset to submodules' remote repo--rebase - this will rebase your local changes on top of the remote branch's latest commit of submodules