Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Remove a Submodule within git

By  on  

For many git-based projects, submodules are useful in avoiding duplicate work and easing utility library updates.  There are times, however, when a submodule needs to be removed from a project.  Submodules aren't removed with git rm submoduledir, they must be removed in a more tedious, manual fashion.  There are many unclear explanations of how to remove a submodule but I found one on Stack Overflow that's concise, so I thought I'd share it.  The steps are as follows:

  1. Delete the relevant section from the .gitmodules file.  The section would look similar to: 
    [submodule "vendor"]
	path = vendor
	url = git://github.com/some-user/some-repo.git
  2. Stage the .gitmodules changes via command line using:git add .gitmodules
  3. Delete the relevant section from .git/config, which will look like: 
    [submodule "vendor"]
	url = git://github.com/some-user/some-repo.git
  4. Run git rm --cached path/to/submodule .  Don't include a trailing slash -- that will lead to an error.
  5. Run rm -rf .git/modules/submodule_name
  6. Commit the change:
  7. Delete the now untracked submodule files rm -rf path/to/submodule

Those steps will get you rid of that unwanted submodule.  A lot harder than adding one, eh?

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Adding Events to Adding Events in MooTools

    Note: This post has been updated. One of my huge web peeves is when an element has click events attached to it but the element doesn't sport the "pointer" cursor. I mean how the hell is the user supposed to know they can/should click on...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools HeatMap

    It's often interesting to think about where on a given element, whether it be the page, an image, or a static DIV, your users are clicking.  With that curiosity in mind, I've created HeatMap: a MooTools class that allows you to detect, load, save, and...

Discussion

  1. Beau West

    Just an interesting side note, as of git 1.8.3, you can use git submodule deinit to handle a lot of the heavy lifting of removing a submodule.

    • Sam

      deinit didn’t work for me; these instructions did (as of git 1.9.3)

  2. Alexander

    Funny, I had this problem just yesterday! Thanks anyway, I’ll remember where the manual is)

  3. Duane

    I found a handy bash script that automates this https://gist.github.com/sharplet/6289697

    Change to a directory that’s in your PATH, I used /usr/local/bin and run the following commands:

    $ curl -o git-remove-submodule https://gist.github.com/sharplet/6289697/raw/git-remove-submodule

    $ chmod 755 git-remove-submodule

    Then to remove a submodule run:

    $ git remove-submodule path/to/submodule

  4. Joe

    These instructions are no longer current, I wouldn’t use them.

  5. Kurt

    This should NOT be used… ‘git rm path/to/submodule’ will work fine on recent git versions.

  6. Brian Berneker

    Thank you so much for this!

    I have a project that I am deploying to AWS, and while I want to keep sub folder repos able to push and pull, I don’t want the parent repo to treat them as submodules, because AWS doesn’t init and pull submodules, resulting in empty submodule folders on deployment.

    By using your steps here I was able to keep the files and still keep the folder contents in my repo.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!