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
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

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!