Please bear with me. I'm not a git expert so I may be wrong with everything I'm even saying here.

Ok. So I saw a few questions that are similar to this one. However, I feel like mine is different enough to ask here.

We have several microapps that we have created in Github. I feel I took out all of the common parts between the microapps and separated them into a sort of library for all of the microapps to use.

Clients will purchase our microapps but sometimes want them customized in a way that's not as common. However, no matter what there are a majority of files that don't change in each microapp.

I created a repository for each microapp and for the library. I have questions on how to structure the clients' repository.

My current structure is the following:

MicroApp1
|-- File 1
|-- File 2
|-- File 3

MicroApp2
|-- File 1
|-- File 2
|-- File 3

MicroAppLibrary
|-- File 1
|-- File 2
|-- File 3

My first question would be how should I include the library in the main microapp repositories? From my understanding, I should use submodules. I want to be able to update the library repository and merge it to all of the microapp repositories.

My second and deeper question is how I should structure the clients' repositories? The way I'm thinking of doing it is by having one repository for each client. In each repository, I would have directories basically containing the repositories. Like the following (if i don't do the submodule and instead just clone the library every time):

Client 1
|-- MicroApp1
    |-- File 1
    |-- File 2
    |-- File 3
|-- MicroApp2
    |-- File 1
    |-- File 2
    |-- File 3
|-- MicroAppLibrary
    |-- File 1
    |-- File 2
    |-- File 3

My problem with that is how to update and merge the code to all of my clients' repositories? For example, If I make a change in the main repository of a microapp, how would I push that change to all of my clients' repositories? It doesn't seem like I can merge a repository to a directory. Would I instead use branches? There's quite a few microapps, and I would want a dev and prod branch on each of them as well.

I have many more questions but feel like it'll be too much for one post.

CodePudding user response：

1. Forget about submodules, use subtree
2. If GitHub, then each client's MicroApp repo is created as fork of base MicroApp, and all customer-specific customization performed in it, while you can always pull common changes from base

CodePudding user response：

There's a special GitHub App for that, called Git X-Modules. Unlike submodules, this tool allows you to add only certain folders from a repository as a module, and updates automatically in the background. So you can create a separate repository for each of your client, add the needed components to it, and set up a one-way synchronization (so that updates from the main project repo are pulled to the clients' repos, but not vise versa).