Coding - github Initializing the Base

Always a good starting point, simply pull the base repository to a blank directory. In this case I've renamed the original /srv/website/bitweaver and am sitting at a command prompt in /srv/website.

cd <base directory for you code e.g. /srv/website>
git clone git@github.com:lsces/bitweaver.git

But even that can be wrong if the repository has not be built properly ( Pass 1 is Here ). First it assumes the user already has ssh access set up to github which may not be the case, so  https://github.com/lsces/bitweaver.git is a better starting point. But at the moment even this will not work as my version of the master repository is rather incomplete and messy. So I need to document building the right base before actually trying to use it. This starting point links to a number of submodules so the next step would be to clone them as well. So one drops down into the main bitweaver directory and runs.

cd bitweaver
git submodule update --init --recursive

Once I have everything packaged right this might actually work, but two things have to happen. First I need all of the submodules present in the .git bitweaver repository, and the 'advise' from Mistral on doing this was less than accurate! Second is ensuring the right version is returned which I'll ignore for the moment, but as long as I tag the updates properly that should be less of a problem. So what IS the correct procedure to pull a new submodule into the code base? Start by adding the submodule to .gitmodules ( although I think git will do this anyway? ) 

[submodule 'submodule']
    path = submodule
    url = https://github.com/lsces/submodule.git

Again not sure if both lines are necessary, need to check again, but documenting what worked to date. Esentially we are downloading the code set to folder submodule. Worth flagging that the external packages have a format external/submodule which is where I have adodb and smarty currently.

git clone https://github.com/lsces/submodule.git submodule
git submodule add https://github.com/lsces/submodule.git submodule

Then the submodule init command can be repeated ... and any errors can be sorted. Just which version is downloaded it the question, and hopefully it will be the right one for the release that has been selected. VSCode allows checking just what build is being used and to date I have been having to manual reset things after using 'submodule update', but one can manually select the right version using.

cd path/to/fisheye
git checkout Bitweaver5
cd ../..

Currently I do now have a list of submodules that matches what I expect and after some fun I can get back to updating the blogs and fisheye code to match the running software. The following command shows the active list, but I am not quite sure about the version tags it returns. Some I do recognise but others a old ones.

git submodule status

I've not actually tested the following yet, but some of it I had used while trying to find out where, for example, fisheye had disappeared to. That it turned out was down to git@github.com not allowing access, while the 443 version worked fine, as does the https:// one.

git submodule deinit -f -- submodule
rm -rf .git/modules/submodule
git rm -f submodule
git submodule add https://github.com/lsces/submodule.git submodule
git submodule update --init --recursive

Much of the help I have been getting in using git has been via duck.ai and Mistral Small 3 chatbot. I've commented on it's accuracy in the blogs and the help has at times been less than productive. The key step 'git submodule add ' was missing until late in the thread! Yet it is key, and on now checking it DOES update the record in .gitmodules, so all of the directions to do this manually were simply wrong. The crib sheet above I am now sure can be much simplified now that I know where to look for the accurate usage instructions.