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Quite often it is the case that you're writing a project of some kind, and after a while it becomes clear that some component of the project is actually useful as a standalone component (a library, perhaps). If you've had that idea from early on, then there's a fair chance that most of that code is in its own folder.
Is there a way to convert one of the sub directories in a Git project to a submodule?
Ideally this would happen such that all of the code in that directory is removed from the parent project, and the submodule project is added in its place, with all the appropriate history, and such that all the parent project commits point to the correct submodule commits.
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In order to add a Git submodule, use the “git submodule add” command and specify the URL of the Git remote repository to be included as a submodule. When adding a Git submodule, your submodule will be staged. As a consequence, you will need to commit your submodule by using the “git commit” command.
This is because of some major drawbacks around git submodules, such as being locked to a specific version of the outer repo, the lacking of effective merge management, and the general notion that the Git repository itself doesn't really know it's now a multi-module repository.
The submodule is just a separate repository. If you want to make changes to it, you should make the changes in its repository and push them like in a regular Git repository (just execute the git commands in the submodule's directory).
Cloning a Project with Submodules If you pass --recurse-submodules to the git clone command, it will automatically initialize and update each submodule in the repository, including nested submodules if any of the submodules in the repository have submodules themselves.
To isolate a subdirectory into its own repository, use filter-branch on a clone of the original repository:
git clone <your_project> <your_submodule>
cd <your_submodule>
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter 'path/to/your/submodule' --prune-empty -- --all
It's then nothing more than deleting your original directory and adding the submodule to your parent project.
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