git submodule clone

Let's clone the project with submodules!

git clone {git address}

When you clone a project with submodules, you might find the submodule directories are empty. This happens because, by default, Git does not automatically clone the content of submodules. If a project has hundreds of submodules, it can be inefficient to retrieve all the submodule content when you only need to fix a few lines in the main project. Additional steps are required to clone the project with its submodules.

First, use the git submodule init command to set up the local configuration file based on the project's submodule settings. Then, the git submodule update command retrieves the submodule data from the remote repository, including the commit information for the current project, and checks out the submodule.

git submodule init
git submodule update

You can follow these steps manually, or you can simplify the process by using the --recurse-submodules option when cloning the project. This option automatically initializes and updates all submodules.

git clone --recurse-submodules {git address}