Git - Tips and Tricks

This pages collects my tips and tricks for challanges with git that I often encounter. These are mainly tested on Git for Windows.

• Clone repository including submodules
• Download submodules manually
• Add git username/email to a specific project
• Line Endings when using WSL

Clone repository including submodules

Normally git clone does not also clone any submodules (i.e. git repositories within the git repository) when cloning. This behaviour can be changed using the --recursive flag¹.

git clone --recursive $repo

Download submodules manually

If you already have cloned the parent repository, you can still clone the submodules manually².

git clone $repo
cd $repo
git submodule update --init --recursive

Add git username/email to a specific project

Sometimes I might need to have a seperate username or email when comitting a specific project, rather than the global username / email. This can be setup in the git settings for the project using the --local flag.

git config --local user.name "Arnav Jain"
git config --local user.email example@arnav.jain.se

Line Endings when using WSL

Sometimes when I edit files in both Windows and in WSL, whole files are shown as changed in git, due to the way line endings work. For me, specifying how git should deal with line endings makes this a more seamless experiences.

git config --global core.autocrlf input
git config --global core.eol lf