Git submodule support #74

Activity

1. matifali

   added

   enhancement

   on Jan 30, 2024
2. bpmct

   added this to the envbuilder v1.0 milestone on Apr 10, 2024
3. mafredri commented on May 7, 2024

   

   mafredri

   on May 7, 2024

   Member

   More actions

   Hey @rgalonso could you share a bit more about how your repositories are structured and where the devcontainer files are located?

   I'm not sure whether or not we support it currently, but utilizing the devcontainer.json initialize command seems like it could be one solution to this issue:

   .devcontainer/devcontainer.json:

   {
   	"initializeCommand": ".devcontainer/initialize.sh"
   }

   .devcontainer/initialize.sh:

   #!/bin/sh
   
   git submodule update --init

   That said, I do think it's a good idea to expand envbuilder with an GIT_CLONE_RECURSE_SUBMODULES=true option. The default behavior should be false so that we don't needlessly enable long checkout times for every project utilizing submodules.
4. rgalonso commented on Jul 8, 2024

   

   rgalonso

   on Jul 8, 2024

   Author

   More actions

   @mafredri , sorry for the delay in replying but I haven't been working on this project recently. The repo is set up as follows:

   .
   └── .devcontainer
       ├── Dockerfile
       ├── devcontainer.json
       └── submod
           └── install.sh
   

   devcontainer.json references a Dockerfile which in turn has a COPY command that references install.sh. install.sh is found in the Git submodule checked out at .devcontainer/submod.

   Your suggestion to use initializeCommand may be a viable workaround. It's not ideal though, because VSCode is already properly handling the submod, so I wouldn't want to duplicate the effort.

   Agreed that GIT_CLONE_RECURSE_SUBMODULES should default to false. No need to slow everyone down with unnecessary checkouts.
5. matifali

   removed

   enhancement

   on Oct 15, 2024
6. bjornrobertsson

   linked a pull request that will close this issuefeat: add git submodule support #485on Dec 11, 2025
7. bjornrobertsson

   closed this as completedin #485on May 22, 2026