How do I clone a local repo with submodules?

Question

Say I recursively clone a repo.

$ git clone --recursive ssh://server/project/client
Cloning into 'client'...
remote: Counting objects: 191, done
remote: Finding sources: 100% (191/191)
remote: Total 191 (delta 53), reused 159 (delta 53)
Receiving objects: 100% (191/191), 27.59 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (53/53), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Submodule 'gui' (ssh://server/project/client/gui.git) registered for path 'gui'
Cloning into 'gui'...
remote: Counting objects: 3213, done
remote: Finding sources: 100% (3213/3213)
remote: Total 3213 (delta 1272), reused 3107 (delta 1272)
Receiving objects: 100% (3213/3213), 47.88 MiB | 12.05 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1272/1272), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Submodule path 'gui': checked out '7315db8d7a8b36929f7874dc5477359839ec51ce'

Now I want to create a local clone of that local repo (perhaps after making and committing changes locally).

$ git clone --recursive client/ client_copy
Cloning into 'client_copy'...
done.
Submodule 'gui' (/home/deployer/client/gui.git) registered for path 'gui'
fatal: repository '/home/deployer/client/gui.git' does not exist
Clone of '/home/deployer/client/gui.git' into submodule path 'gui' failed

My .gitmodules file looks like this:

[submodule "gui"]
        path = gui
        url = ../client/gui.git

Why does this fail, and how can I address the issue?

Answer 1

The issue is with your .gitmodules file. The submodule url in your project is defined as a relative path from the superproject repository, but when the submodules are cloned, they are placed using the path location.

In other words, git is trying to pull the submodules from the url location, but on your local machine, they're actually at the path location.

To fix this, clone just the local superproject repository (git clone /path/to/superproject), then go into the new clone's .gitsubmodules and change the urls to be ./<whatever-the-path-is>. For example, your gui submodule would become:

[submodule "gui"]
        path = gui
        url = ./gui

Change each submodule in .gitmodules to be like this, then run:

git submodule sync
git submodule update --init --recursive

and that should do it!