List submodules in a Git repository

I have a Git repository that has several submodules in it. How do I list the names of all the submodules after git submodule init has been run?

The git submodule foreach command could echo the names of the submodule, but that only works once they have been checked out which has not happened after the init step. There are more steps in the chain that need to happen before they can be checked out, and I don't want to have to hard-wire names of submodules into the script.

So is there a Git command to get the names of all currently registered, but not yet checked out submodules?

Solution 1:

You could use the same mechanism as git submodule init uses itself, namely, look at .gitmodules. This files enumerates each submodule path and the URL it refers to.

For example, from root of repository, cat .gitmodules will print contents to the screen (assuming you have cat).

Because .gitmodule files have the Git configuration format, you can use git config to parse those files:

git config --file .gitmodules --name-only --get-regexp path

Would show you all submodule entries, and with

git config --file .gitmodules --get-regexp path | awk '{ print $2 }'

you would only get the submodule path itself.

Solution 2:

You can use git submodule status or optionally git submodule status --recursive if you want to show nested submodules.

From the Git documentation:

Show the status of the submodules. This will print the SHA-1 of the currently checked out commit for each submodule, along with the submodule path and the output of git describe for the SHA-1. Each SHA-1 will be prefixed with - if the submodule is not initialized, + if the currently checked out submodule commit does not match the SHA-1 found in the index of the containing repository and U if the submodule has merge conflicts.

Solution 3:

The following command will list the submodules:

git submodule--helper list

The output is something like this:

<mode> <sha1> <stage> <location>

Note: It requires Git 2.7.0 or above.