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?

Website performance monitoring
Website performance monitoring
Website performance monitoring
Website performance monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Twitter AJAX Button with MooTools, jQuery, or Dojo

    There's nothing like a subtle, slick website widget that effectively uses CSS and JavaScript to enhance the user experience.  Of course widgets like that take many hours to perfect, but it doesn't take long for that effort to be rewarded with above-average user retention and...

  • By
    Implement jQuery’s hover() Method in MooTools

    jQuery offers a quick event shortcut method called hover that accepts two functions that represent mouseover and mouseout actions. Here's how to implement that for MooTools Elements. The MooTools JavaScript We implement hover() which accepts to functions; one will be called on mouseenter and the other...

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!