When using a Git repo as a backend and that Git repo contains a submodule you can clone the submodules but they are never refreshed. See https://github.com/spring-cloud/spring-cloud-config/issues/1917#issuecomment-873216819 I think we can use `SubmoduleWalk` to walk the submodules and update them https://download.eclipse.org/jgit/site/5.12.0.202106070339-r/apidocs/index.html