Currently if there's a defined in the repository, then the build process always calls sync/update on it. However I've got a monorepo which has many different projects and i don't need to do the submodule sync for the particular deployment I'm using on render. what would usually be a 2minute process to build and deploy ends up being about 10minutes because its syncing submodules i'm not using anyway.

removing the is not an option since it would break every one elses projects.

i think this is straight forward for you since you already check if that file exists before calling the sync command. just need to add another flag/envvar