Git: can I suppress listing of 'modified content'/dirty submodule entries in status, diff, etc?

Somewhen (around the 1.6.x releases, I think) git became aware of changes inside submodules. That only serves to annoy me:

$ git status vendor | grep modified:

modified:   vendor/rails (modified content)

$ git diff vendor/
diff --git a/vendor/rails b/vendor/rails
--- a/vendor/rails
+++ b/vendor/rails
@@ -1 +1 @@
-Subproject commit 046c900df27994d454b7f906caa0e4226bb42b6f
+Subproject commit 046c900df27994d454b7f906caa0e4226bb42b6f-dirty

Please make it stop?

Edit:

Ok, so I have an answer. Now I have another question:

Can I put this in ~/.gitconfig? From my initial it appears that I cannot, and I didn't see anything promising by skimming the patch. (I guess I can still make an alias.)

There is even a possibility to set the ignore mode for every added submodule within the .gitmodules file.

Just today I encountered this problem and immediately wrote an article in my blog about it after finding a solution: How to ignore changes in git submodules

The gist of it:

> Once you added a submodule there will be a file named .gitmodules in the root of your repository

Just add one line to that .gitmodules file:

[submodule "bundle/fugitive"]
	path = bundle/fugitive
	url = git://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive.git
    ignore = dirty

There are two kinds of change notices you can suppress.

The first is untracked content which happens when you make changes to your submodule but have not yet committed those. The parent repository notices these and git status reports it accordingly:

modified: modules/media (untracked content)

You can suppress these with :

[submodule "modules/media"]
   path = modules/media
   url = [email protected]:user/media.git
   ignore = dirty

However, once you commit those changes, the parent repository will once again take notice and report them accordingly:

modified:   modules/media (new commits)

If you want to suppress these too, you need to ignore all changes

[submodule "modules/media"]
   path = modules/media
   url = [email protected]:user/media.git
   ignore = all

Update: See (and upvote) nilshaldenwang's answer regarding the possibility to add to the .gitmodules file a config parameter for ignoring dirty state of a given submodule.

ignore = dirty

---

So git 1.7.2 is out and includes the --ignore-submodules option for status.

From git help status:

--ignore-submodules[=<when>]
Ignore changes to submodules when looking for changes.
<when> can be either "untracked", "dirty" or "all", which
is the default. When "untracked" is used submodules are
not considered dirty when they only contain untracked
content (but they are still scanned for modified content).
Using "dirty" ignores all changes to the work tree of
submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the
superproject are shown (this was the behavior before
1.7.0). Using "all" hides all changes to submodules (and
suppresses the output of submodule summaries when the
config option status.submodulesummary is set).

The value that I want is dirty.

git status --ignore-submodules=dirty

I use an alias because I'm lazy:

alias gst='git status --ignore-submodules=dirty'

As you mention, the patch git submodule: ignore dirty submodules for summary and status is in the making.

Also announced in the Git 1.7.2-rc2 release:

Git v1.7.2 Release Notes (draft)
================================

Updates since v1.7.1
--------------------

> "git status" learned "--ignore-submodules" option.

Meaning:

git config --global diff.ignoreSubmodules dirty

---

Regarding this as an option is not exactly the approach chosen for now:

> After this series I am planning to add a config option 'ignore' to .gitmodules, which can be set for each submodule to either "all", "dirty", "untracked" or "none" (the default).

"git diff" and "git status" will use that config value for each submodule.
Using "--ignore-submodule" overrides this default (and the new parameter "none" will be added there to able to override the config settings).

> And to avoid having to do "git submdule sync" every time that option changes, I would like to search for it in .git/config first.
If it is not found there, it will be taken from .gitmodules, if present.

> So users can override the setting but if they don't, upstream can change it easily (e.g. when a submodules .gitignore has been updated so that "ignore=untracked" is no longer necessary anymore it can be removed).
Also switching branches will have an effect instantly if the 'ignore' entry in .gitmodules is different between branches.

---

Another approach to make git status (or any git command) to ignore a particular submodule is available with Git 2.13 (Q2 2017):

git config submodule.<name>.active false

See more at "Ignore new commits for git submodule".

You can also use

% git config [--global] submodule.ignore dirty

to set submodule.ignore = dirty in your .git/config file. --global will set the ignore flag in your ~/.gitconfig and apply to all your repositories. Without it it should set in .git/config for just the repo you're in currently.

The only documentation I can find on this is submodule.<name>.ignore at the git-config docs. I moved it from a .gitmodules file into my ~/.gitconfig and it's still working for me.

You need to add

ignore = dirty

to .gitmodules

I've answered this question here in greater detail.

Just run

git config --global diff.ignoreSubmodules dirty

to add a local config option to ignore those changes.

So git v1.7.2-rc2 has what I want:

$ git diff --ignore-submodules=dirty vendor

no output

$ git status --ignore-submodules=dirty vendor

On branch …
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

Building your own git howto:

# get git
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git git
cd git
git checkout v1.7.2-rc2

# make git. beware of setting prefix
make configure
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

# you REALLY don't want to `make doc`, use this instead
sudo make quick-install-man
sudo make quick-install-html

You may not want to add ignore = dirty to .gitmodules, you may want to be more selective about the changes you wished to ignore.

To do that, add patterns to .git/submodule_foo/bar/info/exclude, where submodule_foo/bar/ is the path of the submodule.

The patterns are similar to the patterns you would add to .gitignore, with the root being the submodule directory. For instance, this pattern ignores the build directory in the submodule submodule_foo/bar/:

# in .git/submodule_foo/bar/info/exclude:
/build/