Git diff says subproject is dirty

Question

I have just run a git diff  and I am getting the following output for all of my approx 10 submodules   diff --git a  vim bundle bufexplorer b  vim bundle bufexplorer --- a  vim bundle bufexplorer     b  vim bundle bufexplorer    -1  1    -Subproject commit 8c75e65b647238febd0257658b150f717a136359  Subproject commit 8c75e65b647238febd0257658b150f717a136359-dirty   What does this mean  How do I fix it

User · Answer

This is the case because the pointer you have for the submodule isn   t what is actually in the submodule directory  To fix this  you must run git submodule update again

User · Answer

Also removing the submodule and then running git submodule init and git submodule update will obviously do the trick  but may not always be appropriate or possible

User · Answer

EDIT  This answer  and most of the others  are obsolete  see Devpool s answer instead     Originally  there were no config options to make  git diff --ignore-submodules  and  git status --ignore-submodules  the global default  but see also Setting git default flags on commands   An alternative is to set a default ignore config option on each individual submodule you want to ignore  for both git diff and git status   either in the  git config file  local only  or  gitmodules  will be versioned by git   For example    submodule  foobar       url   git bitbucket org foo bar git     ignore   untracked   ignore   untracked to ignore just untracked files  ignore   dirty to also ignore modified files  and ignore   all to ignore also commits   There s apparently no way to wildcard it for all submodules

User · Answer

Update Jan  2021  ten years later   quot git diff quot  man  showed a submodule working tree with untracked cruft as Submodule commit  lt objectname gt -dirty  but a natural expectation is that the  quot -dirty quot  indicator would align with  quot git describe --dirty quot  man   which does not consider having untracked files in the working tree as source of dirtiness  The inconsistency has been fixed with Git 2 31  Q1 2021   See commit 8ef9312  10 Nov 2020  by Sangeeta Jain  sangu09    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 0806279  25 Jan 2021   diff  do not show submodule with untracked files as  quot -dirty quot  Signed-off-by  Sangeeta Jain   Git diff reports a submodule directory as -dirty even when there are only untracked files in the submodule directory  This is inconsistent with what git describe --dirty man  says when run in the submodule directory in that state  Make --ignore-submodules untracked the default for git diff man  when there is no configuration variable or command line option  so that the command would not give  -dirty  suffix to a submodule whose working tree has untracked files  to make it consistent with git describe --dirty that is run in the submodule working tree  And also make --ignore-submodules none the default for git status man  so that the user doesn t end up deleting a submodule that has uncommitted  untracked  files   git config now includes in its man page   By default this is set to untracked so that any untracked submodules are ignored    Original answer  2011  As mentioned in Mark Longair s blog post Git Submodules Explained   Versions 1 7 0 and later of git contain an annoying change in the behavior of git submodule  Submodules are now regarded as dirty if they have any modified files or untracked files  whereas previously it would only be the case if HEAD in the submodule pointed to the wrong commit    The meaning of the plus sign     in the output of git submodule has changed  and the first time that you come across this it takes a little while to figure out what   s going wrong  for example by looking through changelogs or using git bisect on git git to find the change   It would have been much kinder to users to introduce a different symbol for    at the specified version  but dirty      You can fix it by   either committing or undoing the changes evolutions within each of your submodules  before going back to the parent repo  where the diff shouldn t report  quot dirty quot  files anymore    To undo all changes to your submodule just cd into the root directory of your submodule and do git checkout    dotnetCarpenter comments that you can do a  git submodule foreach --recursive git checkout    or add --ignore-submodules to your git diff  to temporarily ignore those  quot dirty quot  submodules   New in Git version 1 7 2 As Noam comments below  this question mentions that  since git version 1 7 2  you can ignore the dirty submodules with  git status --ignore-submodules dirty

User · Answer

git submodule foreach --recursive git checkout     This didn t do the trick for me but it gave me a list of files  in my case only one  that had been changed in the submodule  without me doing anything there    So I could head over to the submodule and git status showed me that my HEAD was detached -  git checkout master  git status to see the modified file once again  git checkout  filename lt   git pull and everything fine again

User · Answer

A submodule may be marked as dirty if filemode settings is enabled and you changed file permissions in submodule subtree.

To disable filemode in a submodule, you can edit /.git/modules/path/to/your/submodule/config and add

[core]
  filemode = false

If you want to ignore all dirty states, you can either set ignore = dirty property in /.gitmodules file, but I think it's better to only disable filemode.

User · Answer

In my case I wasn t sure what had caused this to happen  but I knew I just wanted the submodules to be reset to their latest remote commit and be done with it  This involved combining answers from a couple of different questions on here   git submodule update --recursive --remote --init  Sources   How do I revert my changes to a git submodule   Easy way to pull latest of all git submodules

User · Answer

Do you have adequate permissions to your repo   My solution was unrelated to git  however I was seeing the same error messages  and dirty status of submodules  The root-cause was some files in the  git folder were owned by root  so git did not have write access  therefore git could not change the dirty state of submodules when run as my user  Do you have the same problem  From your repository s root folder  use find to list files owned by root  optional  find  git -user root  Sollution  Linux  Change all files in the  git folder to have you as the owner sudo chown -R  USER  USER  git    alternatively  only the files listed in the above command    sudo find  git -user root -exec chown  USER  USER       How did this happen  In my case I built libraries in sub-modules from a docker container  the docker daemon traditionally runs as root  so files created fall into root root ownership  My user has root privileges by proxy through that service  so even though I didn t sudo anything  my git repository still had changes owned by root  I hope this helps someone  git outa here

User · Answer

To ignore all untracked files in any submodule use the following command to ignore those changes.

git config --global diff.ignoreSubmodules dirty

It will add the following configuration option to your local git config:

[diff]
  ignoreSubmodules = dirty

Further information can be found here

User · Answer

I ended up removing the submodule directory and initializing it once again  cd my-submodule git push cd     rm -rf my-submodule git submodule init git submodule update

[git] Git diff says subproject is dirty

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