What is the current way to remove a git submodule?

Solution 1:

You have the git submodule deinit

git submodule deinit <asubmodule>    
git rm <asubmodule>
# Note: asubmodule (no trailing slash)
# or, if you want to leave it in your working tree
git rm --cached <asubmodule>
rm -rf .git/modules/<asubmodule>

deinit

Un-register the given submodules, i.e. remove the whole submodule.$name
section from .git/config together with their work tree.

Further calls to git submodule update, git submodule foreach and git submodule sync will skip any unregistered submodules until they are initialized again, so use this command if you don’t want to have a local checkout of the submodule in your work tree anymore.

If you really want to remove a submodule from the repository and commit that use git rm instead.

If --force is specified, the submodule’s work tree will be removed even if it contains local modifications.

Solution 2:

I'm using Git version 2.16.2 and git rm does the job mostly well:

git rm path-to-submodule

You can verify with git status and git diff --cached that this deinitializes the submodule and modifies .gitmodules automatically. As always, you need to commit the change.

However, even though the submodule is removed from source control, .git/modules/path-to-submodule still contains the submodule repository and .git/config contains its URL, so you still have to remove those manually:

git config --remove-section submodule.path-to-submodule
rm -rf .git/modules/path-to-submodule

Keeping the submodule repository and configuration is intentional so that you can undo the removal with e.g. git reset --hard.