[Fuente: http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules]

Submodules

It often happens that while working on one project, you need to use another project from within it. Perhaps it’s a library that a third party developed or that you’re developing separately and using in multiple parent projects. A common issue arises in these scenarios: you want to be able to treat the two projects as separate yet still be able to use one from within the other.

Here’s an example. Suppose you’re developing a web site and creating Atom feeds. Instead of writing your own Atom-generating code, you decide to use a library. You’re likely to have to either include this code from a shared library like a CPAN install or Ruby gem, or copy the source code into your own project tree. The issue with including the library is that it’s difficult to customize the library in any way and often more difficult to deploy it, because you need to make sure every client has that library available. The issue with vendoring the code into your own project is that any custom changes you make are difficult to merge when upstream changes become available.

Git addresses this issue using submodules. Submodules allow you to keep a Git repository as a subdirectory of another Git repository. This lets you clone another repository into your project and keep your commits separate.

Starting with Submodules

We’ll walk through developing a simple project that has been split up into a main project and a few sub-projects.

Let’s start by adding an existing Git repository as a submodule of the repository that we’re working on. To add a new submodule you use the git submodule add command with the URL of the project you would like to start tracking. In this example, we’ll add a library called “DbConnector”.

$ git submodule add https://github.com/chaconinc/DbConnector
Cloning into 'DbConnector'...
remote: Counting objects: 11, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (10/10), done.
remote: Total 11 (delta 0), reused 11 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (11/11), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

By default, submodules will add the subproject into a directory named the same as the repository, in this case “DbConnector”. You can add a different path at the end of the command if you want it to go elsewhere.

If you run git status at this point, you’ll notice a few things.

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)

	new file:   .gitmodules
	new file:   DbConnector

First you should notice the new .gitmodules file. This is a configuration file that stores the mapping between the project’s URL and the local subdirectory you’ve pulled it into:

$ cat .gitmodules
[submodule "DbConnector"]
	path = DbConnector
	url = https://github.com/chaconinc/DbConnector

If you have multiple submodules, you’ll have multiple entries in this file. It’s important to note that this file is version-controlled with your other files, like your .gitignore file. It’s pushed and pulled with the rest of your project. This is how other people who clone this project know where to get the submodule projects from.

The other listing in the git status output is the project folder entry. If you run git diff on that, you see something interesting:

$ git diff --cached DbConnector
diff --git a/DbConnector b/DbConnector
new file mode 160000
index 0000000..c3f01dc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/DbConnector
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Subproject commit c3f01dc8862123d317dd46284b05b6892c7b29bc

Although DbConnector is a subdirectory in your working directory, Git sees it as a submodule and doesn’t track its contents when you’re not in that directory. Instead, Git sees it as a particular commit from that repository.

If you want a little nicer diff output, you can pass the --submodule option to git diff.

$ git diff --cached --submodule
diff --git a/.gitmodules b/.gitmodules
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..71fc376
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitmodules
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+[submodule "DbConnector"]
+       path = DbConnector
+       url = https://github.com/chaconinc/DbConnector
Submodule DbConnector 0000000...c3f01dc (new submodule)

When you commit, you see something like this:

$ git commit -am 'added DbConnector module'
[master fb9093c] added DbConnector module
 2 files changed, 4 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 .gitmodules
 create mode 160000 DbConnector

Notice the 160000 mode for the DbConnector entry. That is a special mode in Git that basically means you’re recording a commit as a directory entry rather than a subdirectory or a file.