Git Submodule Silently Became Regular Files — How I Diagnosed and Fixed It

contact@khadirullah.com (Khadirullah Mohammad) — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I ran git submodule update --remote --merge and nothing happened. My Hugo theme was stuck at an old version. Turns out I had accidentally replaced the submodule with manually copied files without realizing it. Here’s how I diagnosed the git state mismatch, restored the proper submodule, and fixed the Cloudflare Pages deployment failure that followed.

I Deleted Files From Git But They Were Still There — Removing Objects From Git History

contact@khadirullah.com (Khadirullah Mohammad) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I accidentally shipped 3MB of unused screenshots to production through my Hugo blog. Deleting them wasn’t enough. They lived forever in git history. Here’s how I investigated, cleaned up, and verified the purge using git filter-repo.

Git on Khadirullah Mohammad

Git Submodule Silently Became Regular Files — How I Diagnosed and Fixed It

I Deleted Files From Git But They Were Still There — Removing Objects From Git History