`--name` option doesn't work with `git submodule add` command

Question

I want to add a git submodule with different name like:

git submodule add --name foo [email protected]:ironsand/cookbook-foo.git 

I wanted to create a git submodule directory named foo, but the repository are created with the name cookbook-foo.

Most likely I'm doing something wrong, but I don't know what was wrong.

How can I change the name of git submodule directory?

Answer 1

Don't conflate the path and the name of a submodule. You want to run

git submodule add [email protected]:ironsand/cookbook-foo.git foo/ 

instead. For more details, see the git-submodule man page; the relevant git-submodule syntax here is

git submodule [--name <name>] <repository> [<path>] 

where...

• <repository> is the URL of the new submodule's origin repository.
• <path>, if specified, determines the name of the subdirectory (of the superproject's root directory) to receive the clone of the repo living at <repository>; if left unspecified, <path> defaults to the name of that repo.
• <name> is the submodule's name, i.e. the name that appear in the corresponding submodule entry in the .gitmodules file; if left unspecified, <name> simply defaults to <path>.

Here is a toy example to fix ideas:

$ cd ~/Desktop $ mkdir test $ cd test $ git init $ git submodule add --name brutus https://github.com/bradfitz/gitbrute bradfitz_bruteforce $ ls -a .           .git            bradfitz_bruteforce ..          .gitmodules $ cat .gitmodules [submodule "brutus"]     path = bradfitz_bruteforce     url = https://github.com/bradfitz/gitbrute