Additional Updates: 2021-03-15

I’ve been really enjoying Hugo static-site generation. I’ve been customizing it as a book-writing framework, and it’s great!

That said, Hugo likes using git submodules to manage themes and similar. As a result of this, when you clone the “main” repo again, your submodules are bare. One can change this behavior if one remembers, but I’m in such a rut of git clone <url> that I don’t really think about getting my sub-modules until it’s too late.

To clone and get submodules: git clone --recurse-submodules <url>

But if you forget…

git submodule update --init # foreach submodule listed in .gitmodules do...
    --recursive             # git update --init

To fetch latest:

$ cd submodule/path
$ git fetch
$ git reset --hard origin/master # or git checkout -q <origin/master SHA>

To add a new submodule:

$ git submodule add <remote_url> <destination_folder>

And to remove one:

$ git submodule deinit <submodule>
$ git rm <submodule>

References

• Stack Overflow
• I’ve also copied gitaarik’s awesome explanation (to save bit rot) after the jump.