Git Submodule - add files from a repository to a folder as submodule

Question

I confused the concept of Git submodules.

I created separate repositories intended to be submodules of another project, then in the main project repository I added empty folders to where these files should be added.

example:

MyProject/
   ./lib
   ./headers
   ./source

those folders are empty because the contents will be coming from the separate repos as submodules but the thing is that they are named differently. the contents of lib/ will be coming from lib_trunk submodule and source is called source_trunk

is there a way to tweak the submodules feature in git to instead clone the repo as named it will just add the files contained in the repository?

Answer 1

You don't need to create the folders in advance, git will do it for you. And those folders can be named differently than the -submodule- repositories they contain.

git submodule add url/to/lib_trunk lib

will initialize a submodule in a lib folder from a repository called lib_trunk . Same thing with source .

If, as you say, both lib and source already exist, you may have to delete them before doing git submodule add (but as they're empty there is no reason to keep them).