How to `git submodule add` Existing sub Repository?

What went wrong

Where you went wrong is doing the

$ git add . 

That adds everything, so also foo/bar, to the index of the current repository (ready to be committed thus).

Correct way

If you just don't do that and continue with

$ git submodule add https://github.com/CarloWood/XYZ.git foo/bar 

then that should work; this would detect that foo/bar is an already cloned repository and add it to the current repository as a submodule.

Note that it is not needed to clone first. You explicitly say you already have done that, but for clarity for other readers I'd like to point out that if you omit the clone right before the git add . too (so there isn't a foo/bar at all now) then the above git submodule add ... would see there isn't anything yet and then simply clone it for you.

Note that there is a minor difference between methods. If you start with cloning then foo/.git will be a directory, while if you use git submodule add to do the cloning then this .git repository is put in .git/modules/foo of the parent project and foo/.git is a file containing the path to that. There is no real difference however as using a file for the .git to point anywhere else is generic and could be used anywhere; you can not conclude anything from .git being a file or directory.

One way to do it is to manually create the .gitmodules file.

The format is below:

[submodule "path/to/submodule1"] path = path/to/submodule/1 url = [email protected]:user/submodule1 [submodule "path/to/submodule2"] path = path/to/submodule/2 url = [email protected]:user/submodule2 

Note you'll have to run

git submodule sync 

to apply the changes

git submodule add detects if the path given for a submosule exists and contains an initialized git repo, so no neeed to worry about that. I ran into a similar problem so I wrote a (hacky) script to deal with this issue.

#!/bin/bash # save super directory currentDir=`pwd` # get all the git repos inside (except .) and format them # the way git does gitDirs=`find -type d -name ".git" | sed -e 's|.git$||' -e 's|./||' -e 's|/$||' | grep -v "^$"` for i in ${gitDirs[@]} do echo "dealing with $i now" cd $i # get the remote url for each submodule fetchUrl=`git remote -v | awk '/fetch/ {print $2}'` # for my purposes repos without remotes are useless # but you may have a different use case if [[ -z $fetchUrl ]] then echo "fetch url not found for this directory" continue else echo "got a fetch url of $fetchUrl for git repo $i" fi cd $currentDir # make sure it isn't tracked as a submodule already existing=`grep -A5 $i ./.gitmodules | grep $fetchUrl` if [[ -z $existing ]] then echo "does not exist in .gitmodules yet, will create now" # if it doesn't exist yet then create it git submodule add $fetchUrl $i else echo "$i is already present as a submodule with fetch url: $fetchUrl" echo "The command we would have used is: git submodule add $fetchUrl $i" fi done 

Don't add the submodule using git add, use git submodule add

git submodule [--quiet] add [<options>] [--] <repository> [<path>] 

If you've already cloned the repository, just run

git submodule add -- "$(git -C ./sub/ remote get-url origin)" ./sub/ 

NB: The relative path prefix, ./, is important here ... unless you are specifying an absolute path.

Alternatively

git submodule add -- ./sub.git ./sub 

if the project is using relative URLs.

To augment Carlos Answer, for an existing repo. It already contains its URL. You can simply

 git submodule add $(cat repodir/.git/config | grep url | cut -d '=' -f 2) reponame 

1. remove files from index foo/bar: git rm -f --cached foo/bar
2. git submodule add https://github.com/octocat/Spoon-Knife.git ./foo/bar

At least if the (future) submodules do not have recursive other repositories/.git directories then the following simply adds all of them. (I am not sure why I had to supply the directory as path and "repository" to the command but whatever...)

for d in $(dirname $(find -mindepth 2 -name .git)) ; do git submodule add -- ./$d/ ./$d/ ; done