git archive export with submodules (git archive all / recursive)

Question

I have a website directory versioned with git. I use submodules for required libraries like Twitter Bootstrap, colorbox and lessjs because I should not track the sourcecode but only the version of their code I use.

Now I want to deploy the project and therefore I need the submodule code too. By using git archive I don't get the source files/code from the submodules.

The following three approaches TRY to achieve what I want but dont't work: 1st approach

#!/bin/sh

export revision="$1"

export GIT_INDEX_FILE=".git/tmpindex"
rm -f "$GIT_INDEX_FILE"

git read-tree $revision

export up="$(pwd)"

read_one_level () {
        export GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES="$GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES":$(
            git submodule foreach 'echo "$up/$path/.git/objects"' |
            grep -E -v '^(Entering|No submodule mapping found)' |
            tr '\n' : |
            sed 's/:$//'
        )

        git submodule foreach '
                cd "$up"
                subcommit=$(git rev-parse :"$path")
                git rm --cached "$path"
                git read-tree -i --prefix="$path/" $subcommit
        ' >/dev/null
}

while git ls-files -s | grep -q ^160000; do
    read_one_level
done

git archive --format=tar $(git write-tree)

rm -f "$GIT_INDEX_FILE" 

Thomas Rast in http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Running-git-archive-recursively-over-submodules-td4577012.html

This gives me errors both on Windows as in Linux that there are no objects files found.

2nd approach https://github.com/meitar/git-archive-all.sh

Complains about mktemp not found on Windows. And correcting calls to git archive (from git-archive) does not give submodules in the tar ...:(

3rd approach https://github.com/Kentzo/git-archive-all

Is outdated from my point of view by not being compatible to latest python 3.3 and still not fully working by using 2.7 because samefile complains.

So my question is now: Is there any recent way/approach to deal with exporting/archive a git project including submodules?

Or should I check subtrees for this workflow?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I'm using the following code

git archive -o release.zip HEAD
git submodule --quiet foreach 'cd $toplevel; zip -ru release.zip $sm_path'

to create a complete archive of a git repository with all submodules.

If you want to be fancy you can even rewrite the zip comment via

echo -e "Repository:\n$(git rev-parse HEAD)\nSubmodule status:\n$(git submodule status)" | zip -u release.zip -z

All on windows using infozip.