Is it possible for a git submodule to be made of several other git submodules, and the super git repo to fetch the contents for each submodule?
I have tried to do this using the obvious/naive approach of creating a git repo holding several submodules.
Then adding this git repo to another git repo as a submodule.
Then attempting to pull from the root directory of the super git repo by git submodule init and then git submodule update. But this fails to fetch the sub-submodules.
As mentioned in Retrospectively add --recursive to a git repo
git submodule update --init --recursive should work.
git submodule init; git submodule update --recursive was synonymous with the above, but it is not.
--init flag, the submodules, within one of my submodules, just get initialized to old versions, not the most current ones.git submodule foreach git pull origin master, and it works partially: submodules are updated, but sometimes the HEAD gets detached and for submodules within submodules, I can't commit my direct submodule's changes because it has "modified content" not "new commits" (since its own submodules have "new commits" and are updated).As Sridhar comments below, from Git1.6.5+, git clone --recursive is now the official alternative, described in:
git clone --submodule"--recursive to a git repo"alias $ git config --global alias.cloner = 'clone --recursive', which avoids shadowing the normal git clone command)inamiy correctly points out the git submodule update --init --recursive command, introduced in commit b13fd5c, again in git1.6.5, by Johan Herland (jherland).
And IceFire adds in the comments:
If you would like to checkout only one submodule of a submodule, then
git submodule update --init <submoduleName>is the way to go.
(older original answer)
According to the manual page
git submodule update --recursive should update any nested submodules. But the init part may not be recursive.
Depending on your version of Git, you could fall back to a more "scripting" approach, with this article Recursively Updating Git Submodules which allows for recursive init and update:
#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use Cwd; init_and_update(); exit; sub init_and_update { my $start_path = cwd(); my %paths; my $updated; do { my $data = `find . -name '.gitmodules'`; chomp($data); $data =~ s/\/\.gitmodules//g; foreach my $path (split(/\n/, $data)) { $paths{$path} = '' if($paths{$path} eq ''); } $updated = 0; foreach my $path (sort keys %paths) { if($paths{$path} eq '') { chdir($path); `git submodule init 2>&1`; `git submodule update 2>&1`; chdir($start_path); if($ARGV[0] eq '--remove-gitmodules') { unlink("$path/.gitmodules"); } $paths{$path} = 1; $updated++; } } } while($updated); } 
git clone --recursive sufficient?
git submodule update --init <submoduleName> is the way to go; I got here when searching for this answer