Best Git Project management for Fronted and Backend Teams.

3 min readOct 16, 2020

Setting up a new repository

git init
536 git remote add origin https://github.com/chapskev/frontend_backend_project.git
537 git remote -v
538 git status
539 git add .
540 git status
541 git pull
542 git pull origin master
543 git submodule add https://github.com/chapskev/frontend_app.git frontend_app
544 git status
545 cat .gitmodules

See it in action

We are going to create a branch developed for both frontend and backend and then add mock files.

cd frontend_app/
git checkout -b development
echo “Iam a fronted app “ > index.html
git add .
git commit -a -m “add new index.html file with some demo mock content”

At this point, you’ll have a rock folder inside slingshot, but if you were to peek inside that folder, depending on your version of Git, you might see … nothing.

Newer versions of Git will do this automatically, but older versions will require you to explicitly tell Git to download the contents of rock:

git submodule update --init --recursive

If everything looks good, you can commit this change and you’ll have a rock folder in the slingshot repository with all the content from the rock repository

Joining a project using submodules

Now, say you’re a new collaborator joining Project Slingshot. You’d start by running git clone to download the contents of the slingshot repository. At this point, if you were to peek inside the rock folder, you’d see … nothing.

Again, Git expects us to explicitly ask it to download the submodule’s content. You can use git submodule update --init --recursive here as well, but if you’re cloning slingshot for the first time, you can use a modified clone command to ensure you download everything, including any submodules:

git clone --recursive <project url>

How to Git push and update the Main repository and respective sub modules in the project

571 git add .
572 git commit -a -m “This commit will only commit the new three files .gitmodule backend_app frontend_app”
573 git status
574 git commit — amend
575 git push
576 git push — set-upstream origin development

Github sample module

Note You can also use the following shortcut to pull the latest changes made to your submodules and get your umbrella project to point to the last commits.