Cloning an Existing Textbook

The instructions to clone an existing textbook are simple, but require a few extra steps compared to a normal git repository setup.

The basic version is to run these commands, where <directory> is the directory where the site should be stored:

git clone <url> <directory>
cd <directory>
git submodule init
git pull --recurse

These commands do the following:

  • git clone <url> <directory> will clone the existing git repository at <url> into the local directory <directory>.
  • cd <directory> will change the current working directory to be the directory where the site is stored.
  • git submodule init will initialize the submodules for this repository. We use git submodules to keep track of the theme and make it easy to update the theme as needed.
  • git pull --recurse will pull the latest version of the repository AND the theme. The theme will be locked to a specific version unless you go through the steps to Update the Theme.