Best practice for cloning custom components from GitHub

Many custom components are distributed via GitHub and are set up such that the key files are stored under custom_components/integration-name. In general, instructions say to clone the GitHub repository and then copy the custom_components folder over to your personal HA config. However, this seems to be a bit inefficient. Shouldn’t there be an easy way of adding the integration as a Git submodule so that it’s easy to edit custom integrations in-place and submit pull requests? Would symbolic links be the way to go?

Are you familiar with HACS?

All inefficiency gone!

I came across that. If that’s the best approach, I will go with that. I generally prefer the command line where possible.

Symbolic links work. Just tried that and it worked, documented here: