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gitgit-submodules

Git pull not downloading contents of submodule even with submodule.recurse set

When I execute git pull, I want all the submodules to download. According to the winning answer of this question, setting git config --global submodule.recurse true will change the behavior of git pull so that it recurses through the submodules. That is not happening for some reason.

Specifically, I have a repo with a submodule called alib. So I get it into a fresh location.

git config --global submodule.recurse true

mkdir foo
cd foo
git clone https://something.com/MyRepoWithSubmodule.git
git pull

The alib directory is there, however, none of the contents of the submodule are.
What am I missing in order to get the contents of alib to download during git pull

Solution

  • The documentation (git-config(1)) says about submodule.recurse (emphasis mine):

    submodule.recurse

    A boolean indicating if commands should enable the --recurse-submodules option by default. Applies to all commands that support this option (checkout, fetch, grep, pull, push, read-tree, reset, restore and switch) except clone and ls-files...

    So, the submodule.recurse option explicitly does not apply to git clone. You need to either git clone --recurse-submodules, or after cloning run git submodule update --init --recursive.

    Running git pull immediately after git clone is effectively a no-op (unless someone happens to push something immediately after the clone operation, there won't be any changes to pull).

    With submodule.recurse set to true, running git pull will automatically update submodules that have a new commit in the parent repo:

    $ git pull
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 2 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (2/2), 278 bytes | 278.00 KiB/s, done.
From localhost:/home/lars/tmp/demo/repo3
   c07f940..044186f  main       -> origin/main
Fetching submodule repo1
From localhost:/home/lars/tmp/demo/repo1
   cf4468f..da359ec  main       -> origin/main
Fetching submodule repo2
Warning: Permanently added 'localhost' (ED25519) to the list of known hosts.
Updating c07f940..044186f
Fast-forward
 repo1 | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/main.
Submodule path 'repo1': rebased into 'da359ec652e59cbd3cbc23ea405cc106519344a8'

    See the Fetching submodule ... in response to the git pull.