Download git submodules for tarball

Question

Can I load submodules for a repository with only a working directory?

If I download tarball from a repository from GitHub, which is equivalent to a small clone without a .git folder, is it possible to “load” submodules into the working directory at all?

I tried git init && git submodule update --init , but this does not initialize or update the submodules. The .gitmodules file is in the current directory.

Refresh . A few more questions to the question: we would like to use tarball to check the repositories on Travis CI , but several people use git submodules. "Do not use git submodules", therefore, will not be a good answer, but the answer really should not be something supported. I just want the folder in which the code was extracted, and with the initialized submodules, there is no need for anything, which will allow me to post more changes later.

Answer 1

Combining the wget / tar method with git init will not help you initialize the submodules:

Everything is not tracked after git init .

You need to add and transfer everything before:

 git submodule update --init --recursive --force 

This git submodule will "work", but only create empty directories.
This is because the tar file did not include special entries (160000) created by git submodule add .

You need to re-declare these submodules:

 C:\prog\git\ReactiveCocoa-2.0-development>git submodule add --name xcconfigs https://github.com/jspahrsummers/xcconfigs.git external\xcconfigs Cloning into 'external\xcconfigs'... remote: Counting objects: 312, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (229/229), done. Receal 312 (delta 87), reused 306 (delta 82) Receiving objects: 100% (312/312), 64.51 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (87/87), done.