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This article explains how to delete a submodule in git.

When developing software projects, we often use external frameworks and libraries required by our projects. These frameworks and libraries may be open source and stored in git repositories.

We may want to keep the source code of these external libraries in the project directory of the git repository. The submodule feature of git allows us to keep these external sources (which are separate Git repositories) as subdirectories in our project Git repository.

We might then decide to delete these Git submodules, as they might no longer be relevant to our project.

We will now explain it with an example.

Deleting a submodule in Git

When working on software projects, we often need to use external resources from libraries. External libraries may be developed by a third party or a different team.

Such external libraries can be tracked in a separate Git repository.

We can use Git's submodule feature to merge such an external Git repository into a subdirectory of our project's Git repository. Thus, we can clone another repository into our project and keep each individual commit.

Often, we may replace or remove such external libraries. We may feel that our project no longer requires such an external library.

Therefore, we decided to remove the external library from our project Git repository. To do this, we need to delete the Git submodule of the external library.

Suppose we have a submodule in our project Git repository good-ext-lib. We now want to delete the submodule from the Git repository and the file system good-ext-lib.

We need to run the Git command as follows to remove the submodule.

$ git submodule deinit -f path/to/good-ext-lib

$ rm -rf .git/modules/path/to/good-ext-lib

$ git rm -f path/to/good-ext-lib

The command git submodule deninitunregisters the submodule good-ext-lib. It git/configremoves the entire submodule.$name_submodule section from the file. Additionally, it deletes the working tree of the submodule.

.gitgood-ext-libThe command with the submodule path in the folder removes the submodule directory rm -rffrom the directory of our project ..git/modules

good-ext-libThe command with the submodule path in the project directory git rmremoves the tracking data for the superproject (our project). It removes gitlinkthe entry for . Additionally, it eliminates .gitmodulesthe submodule section present in the ./opt/src/main/file and stages the file.

Finally, we need to commit the removal of good-ext-libthe submodule as shown below.

$ git commit -m "removed submodule good-ext-lib"

So now we have removed good-ext-libthe submodule from our project directory in Git.

Thus, we showed how to delete a submodule in Git.