Git Submodules Tutorial | For Beginners
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ค. 2024
- Hello! Today's video is looking at Git Submodules. Most people think badly of submodules and tend to stay away from them, but I have been using them lately and really enjoyed working with them! I hope you enjoy :)
Useful Links:
GitHub: github.com/redhwannacef/git-s...
Git Submodules: git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-To...
Music:
• Timeless
Huge thank you to Harris Heller for providing copyright-free music.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
0:30 - What?
2:07- Why/When?
3:36 - Show me the code!
14:30 - Thank You For Watching!
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Hey everyone! My name is Redhwan Nacef (Red for short). In this channel, I'm hoping to share my thoughts on software engineering, coding, management, and all things tech. I hope you enjoy! - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I was looking for an answer regarding the cloning of submodules and you covered it in an incredibly clear way ! Thanks for that, great video!
You're very welcome, glad it helped! Thank you for the feedback.
Great tutorial, concise and great explanation. Thanks for showing all the other tutorials name in this video. Earned a sub 👍
Thanks for the feedback and the sub. 🙂
This is a precious video, thanks for clarifying this subject !
Simple and precise explanations, incredibly helpful. Thank you so much!
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it 😊
I enjoyed the content! It helped me a lot with a project I'm working on with some colleagues.
Very nice!
Thanks for the video! It helped me solved a issue that I was struggling for a whole day
Glad it helped!
Clear and concise. Good presentation style and technique.
I just want to leave feedback here. I find your way of giving a material to be of very high quality. Compared to many others on learning platforms, you can give material fast and keep the essential pieces. Like, you only cover the most vital submodule commands. Really appreciate the way you teach. Saw this video and subscribed for more.
Best git submodules tutorial I've seen
Well presented, clear, and informative! Great job! Thank you. :)
This was a very nice beginner's look at submodules. Thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
Redhwan: "This will take a few seconds"
Boost: "Go grab a coffee"
😂
Very well done, awesome tutorial, clean and precise :)
Thanks a lot!
This was great! Nice explanation. Now I can start using git submodules.
Thanks, glad it helped! 🙂
Really good explanation! Great video, thanks for it!
Thanks, glad it was helpful!
Very simple and clear, thanks man!
Thank you from a fellow scot, i am messing about with robot programming and need to share python and nodejs code between the code running on the robot and the code running on the desktop this gave me the overview i needed to realise that submodules were the elegant solution i needed. So many other options i have tried just gave me a major headache.
Excellent tutorial. Answered all my questions and more.
Thanks, glad it helped.
Amazing, thank you!
Neato! Amazing explanation, thanks a lot. Greetings from Colombia. Keep it up!
Hello Colombia! Glad you enjoyed it 😊
Perfect ! Thanks for this tutorial
I think you helped me with a huge problem, I am trying to use strapi for my back-end and I have struggled getting it to commit in one repo I do believe this will be the fix! TY!
Also this is amazing for managing typescript between projects (I think, gonna try now) Thank you so much!
Hope it goes well! Anytime 🙂
Precise and straight to the point. Thank you so much. ❣
Glad you liked it 😊
Thanks for your time, totally helpful!
Your video really simplified this process for me! One question though:
In other videos & articles, I've seen people say that, in order to incorporate changes from the submodule's repo, you have to run `git submodule update --remote` in the superproject repo before adding/committing/pushing. It looks like you didn't do that here, but everything worked fine.
Do you know if `git submodule update --remote` is necessary?
Glad it helped.
The reason I did not need that command here is because I updated the submodule directly from within the parent project. So there were no other changes in the remote. If for example a colleague had updated the submodule else where, my local copy would not know about that, so I would need to ensure it is updated before developing. One way to do it is with the command `git submodule update --remote`, the other would be to `cd` into the submodule repo, checkout master and just do a git pull. Hopefully that makes sense?
Thank's you man 🤝, very useful
You're welcome 👍
Brilliant explanation. Thank you so much!
Thanks! 🙂
Clean and usefull explanations. Thank you!!!.
Glad you liked it!
Thanks for the video, it explains the matter clearly.
Glad it was helpful!
Very useful and well explained. Thanks
wow simple and yet all i needed
Thank you 😊
Clear & Precise!
Glad you think so!
Nice! Thank you for the content
Thanks, my pleasure!
Excellent explanation. Thanks.
Glad it was helpful!
Fantastic Explanation. Many Thanks.
Thanks, you're welcome!
This is helpful, thanks
Detailed explanation to get started with submodules.
You could also use the "git submodule update --remote" to update the submodules if the changes were made by another member of your team(Not locally).
Biggest question mark I was left with, thanks for answering!
Thanks for the additional information.
Thank you very much for making this video ☺️
Thank you very much for watching 😊
Great, thanks man.
Great explanation
Thanks, man!
No problem!
great explanation, thanks
Thank you.
best tutorial for submodule concept
Glad you liked it, thanks!
clearly explained, thank you
You're welcome
This guy rocks. Thank you!
Cheers!
Thanks for the explanation.
You're welcome!
Thank you so much, excellent tutorial
You're very welcome, glad you liked it.
Very good tutorial, thanks.
Thank you and you’re welcome 😊
Thank you for the tutorial. I have a question, what about private submodule repo?
Very nice, thank you
Thanks and you're welcome 😊
Good explanation, thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
Good tutorial, appreciated.
Thank you.
Great video. I'm curious how you are displaying the options of a command inside the terminal? It's almost like a dynamic "--help" flag as you're typing out the command. Never seen this before. Is this a feature internal to PyCharm?
Thanks. This is not the IDE but the shell. I believe I was using zshell and oh my zsh at this point (I now use fish shell), if you search for those terms you should find what you are looking for.
great video. Thanks!
Glad you liked it! Thanks 😊
Awesome tutorial
Thanks!
Hi Nice explanation!!! I have one query, if we initialize a sub-module so for which branch of sub-module project it is considered in the parent project?
Thanks! You can specify the submodule branch in the .gitmodules directory, if not it defaults to the remote HEAD (which basically means it defaults to the default branch). Hope that helps!
This was really helpful .Than you
Glad to hear that, thanks.
Good explanation. Last time I had to share a unit of in-house code between two projects I went with the internal NPM package, which was a bit of a nightmare to set up, deal with special keys etc etc. This would have been cleaner.
Thanks! Yea I have done the exact same thing before, always good to better understand the alternatives. 🙂
Great video. Question for you. I have a git repo that I need to break into different repos with submodules. Do you know of a way to do that and keep the git history for each new repo?
Thanks. Not sure if there is an easy way to do that, I remember hearing about a project where this was done but it was all manual with cherry picking etc. There may be some tools out there that might help with this. Good luck!
Very good video, very helpful, tks
Thanks
Thank you for the video tutorial, it helps me a lot! keep up
Glad it helped!
I’m not a git guru but to sum up
- git submodule is a fancy name for submodules, they’re essentially just git projects
- any commands u can use with your own git project can be used inside the modele projects(git push pull etc)
- to recursively install submodules -recursive-submodules is necessary with git pull or clone
- same thing goes for the git push as well
You got it! The .gitmodules file is probably a good thing to remember too when summing up.
0.75 Playback speed + focus helps.
👍🏽
This was really helpful
Great to hear 😊
this was lit, ty sm
Glad you liked it
Thanks for the explanation. Simple and I can easily understand.
But how to remove submodule completely from main repository? For example, remove youtube-tutorial submodule from git-submodule-tutorial repository?
This was so helpful! I do have a question though... I made a change in my submodule repo but the change never showed up in my parent repo. Is there where I need to explicitly ask git to go update to the latest commit in that submodule?
Thank you! Thats right (assuming you have committed and pushed the changes in the submodule). I usually "cd" in to the submodule from the parent repo and git pull from there, but you can also use the submodule commands from the parent directory and that should do the trick. 👍🏽
@@RedhwanNacef Thank you so much for responding! A little bit after I asked, I ended up figuring out how to pull in those changes and then push/commit those changes to the submodule as a part of the parent repo. You said it very clearly here too, to track exactly what I was doing! Thanks again! :)
Anytime 😊
❤🔥
👌🏼
For me it was a little bit confusing, that the name of the "normal repository" contains the word submodule and the submodule itself didn't. I had to wrap my head around this couple of times but could have been just me.
Other then that: Great explanation!
Thanks ❤
that was great thanks
You’re welcome 😊
Great video
Thanks
Can you specify a submodule to reference a branch rather than a commit hash?
The idea is to work on that submodule branch, ie new commits, push, pull/fetch, rebase. Then merge the submodule branch into, say, master.
Can you specify a tag for the submodule?
I don't think you can, it will always reference a commit, however, you can specify a commit hash from a different branch. For example, you can specify a branch in the .gitmodules file and it will use the latest commit hash from the branch. You can still do the workflow you have specified, you will just need to make sure you use the right commit hash once merged. I don't you can specify a tag either, but again a tag will always be linked to a commit hash so I think you could use that commit. Hope that helps!
Nice explanation.
Thanks
but if we have more than one submodule and we want to downoloaded only a specific submodule into the main repo ?
Thank you
You’re welcome
Thanks a lot!
Anytime!
thank you for Video.
question: how you can show the options in command line like in min : 14:02 ?
Anytime. I use zsh with the git plugin: github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/tree/master/plugins/git. which gives me that functionality :)
Is there a way to do this with branches in the same repository instead of two different repositories ?
Not sure, I have never thought to do that. You could always try add the path/url and see if it works?
Should I create a seperate repo for submodule?
nice info brother
Thanks!
What does git submodule point to by default? I know exact answer is certain commit hash, but how is that chosen and at which time? Can it be configured? How exectly does process of updating submodule go.
If I remember correctly, it will point to either the remote HEAD by default. You can specify a branch in the .gitmodules files too to override this. Then from that branch it will take the latest commit hash. In terms of what time, it will be at the time of running the command. Does that help?
Great Video!! 👍👍 What if I'm cloning a third party tool that I'm not going to be making commits to, or very small changes at most? Can I just pull the commits to that repo?
Thank you! Yea the same approach can used with any repository as long as it is publicly accessible. Not sure if you have a specific use case in mind?
@@RedhwanNacef I was thinking about receiving any changes they make in their repo. I may not make any changes to that third party tool myself. Forvige me, I'm still a noob 🙈
Yea that makes sense. Git submodules should work fine for that. No worries, you will be a pro in no time!
Hi, it doesn't make much sense to use always the latest commit of a library. What can I do if I want to use e.g. tag V1.0 of a lib which is one of my submodules?
You can just checkout that branch/tag/commit in the submodule and make sure to commit the parent module. It will only ever update if committed so that should work fine.
Thanks for the explanation 👍
One clarification needed...
I own a repo called repo1 and it has a submodule called repo2. The repo2 has two files namely a.txt and b.txt . I want to create a new file c.txt in repo1 . I want to make sure the c.txt file should have the content of a.txt which is available under repo2 through submodule. How could I achieve this ? Any changes to a.txt in repo2 (in actual repo) also should reflect in my c.txt
Hope I m not confusing... 😀
Anytime :) This depends on the tech used of course and exactly what you are trying to achieve. In general, if you need c.txt to contain content from the submodule, you could add a simple script that copies that content over. Then just run this script anytime you update the submodule. (or even a script that does both). Hope that helps, but if you are looking for something more specific let me know.
@@RedhwanNacef thanks mate 👍... that clarifies my doubt
Can we can manage the Pull Request by updating submodule from main repo ?
If I understand you correctly, yes. Because you can update and push any branch from the main repo, then any PR connected will be updated accordingly.
Can i update multiple destination repositories with one source repository while executing some git submodules command at the source repository ?
"git submodule update --remote" might be what you are looking for?
howcome everytime i run submodules update, i go look at my submodule and it checksout the commit (now outdated) that i originally made the project with....thought update would fetch the latest commit for me. So im finding to stay up to date I have to go checkout main from my submodule. How to I make my submodule always update to main not the commit i started my repo with
I believe submodule update will only update according to the local remote. Have you tried adding the --remote flag? That should actually fetch and update for you (making the submodule is on the main branch too).
Thanks for the video. However I think the real trouble is at the Pull Request, for instance, how do you take a look at the commits of one repo without another repo, and it seems to me you have to have two Pull Request from two repos to be merged in at the SAME time? isn't this crazy?
You're welcome. The idea is that these should still move independently. So you or someone else may work on the module separately. Then once ready you would make changes to the parent repo. This is the same workflow as working with an external library, just without the need of maintaining and publishing versions. Hope that makes sense.
Can i "check out" a single directory?
Let's say i just want the "source" directory of another repository. I don't need all the other mambo jambo such as tests or documentation or readmes, but still have the possibility to keep it up to date via git
Hmm, I don't think that is possible unfortunately, I believe it is just full repositories.
can we modify the codes in submodules. i have a repo with submodule pointing to other repo.i want to modify some codes in submodule in my repo only.i dont want to alter the code of the repo it is pointing to. Repo1 has submodule 1. submodule1 is pointing to Repo2 commits. now i want to modify the submodule1 in the Repo1 only not in Repo2
I think this is doable but not in the way you have suggested, i.e. you cannot add changes for the submodule and store them in Repo1, because Repo1 does not track any changes to the submodule other than the commit it is pointing to. An approach could be to create a a branch in a fork of repo 2 for example. That way you can have your code/commits there without altering the original repo, but this means you will have to manually ensure any new updates are merged/rebased on top of your custom changes. There may be other ways of achieving what you want without modifying the code directly but this is completely depending on the structure of the repo itself. Hope this helps.
Hi,
I am not able to see the submodule files i guess now i got the answer why.....thanks for that..but what if i want to undo and make it invisible again?
also how can i add a version tag to the submodules and how can i use a feature branch of repo A as a submodule inside repo B so i can run a github action on B
You're welcome. I wonder if the "deinit" command is what you are looking for here? Tags would be added the same as any other repo. In terms of feature branch you can specify the branch in the .gitmodules file. Hopefully that helps!
U made some changes to the local repo and comitted them from which u got the submodule. How is git able to figure out that there are changes in the local repo when it is pointing to the remote url and not the local repo from which we got the submodule?
Good question, if you remember we have a ".gitmodules" that has a path to the submodule. This is telling git where to track the local changes. This is how it knows there are changes in the local repo. Hope that makes sense.
9:36 - Showing the branch in the command line prefix is very clever. How do you do that? Is that automatic? I am under anaconda, so I get to see the environment name, not the git branch name. Cheers,
I am using a shell called 'Zsh' with 'Oh My Zsh' will lets you configure/customise all of this. It's very useful.
is it possible to configure my submodule so that it always points to the latest commit on a specific branch?
You can add a branch property to the .gitmodules file (e.g. "branch = some-branch"). By default it is pointing to the default branch of the repo. I think that might be what you are looking for.
9:00 if you have cloned your git repo but need to install the submodule, the command is "git submodule update --init"
Hi there , can you create a new branch ... and try to edit any fiele on the git sobmodules .. and than pusch it ... iits not works for me ?
If I understand you correctly, that will not work. When you edit a file in the sub repository, the changes wont be reflected in the root repository, only in the submodule itself. Does that help?
Hi quick qn, what is the ide youre using in 3:52?
IntelliJ IDEA :)
May I know how do you show all the commands at 4:11?
Also may I know what IDE is this?
I was using the 'ZSH' shell with the git plugin. So when I tab it shows recommendations. (I use Fish shell now). It is IntelliJ IDEA.