How can I run Git submodules?

Question

How can I run these submodules? The only thing i can find on the web is information on how to create submodules. But i just need to run them. Is this really so difficult?

After you have clone the repository, you'll need to run the following to pull in all the submodules:

git submodule init
git submodule update
cd externals/curlcall
git submodule init
git submodule update

Answer 1

Git submodules are vaguely like externals in subversion - they're references to external git repositories.

What the instructions in wikislurp are saying is that, in order to use the software, you need to not only clone the repository itself, but also clone the repositories that are referred to by the submodules.

The thing you quoted from the README,

git submodule init
git submodule update
cd externals/curlcall
git submodule init
git submodule update

are a series of commands to run in order to fetch the repositories referred to by the submodules, which are probably needed for building the software or whatever. Just run them at the same command line prompt you used to clone the repository.

Alternatively, if you have a new enough version of Git, you can abbreviate all of those commands to just git submodule update --init --recursive

Answer 2

http://progit.org/book/ch6-6.html