Restore git submodules from .gitmodules

Question

I have a folder, which was a git repo. It contains some files and .gitmodules file. Now, when I do git init and then git submodule init, the latter

Answer 1

I had a similar issue. git submodule init was failing silently.

When I did:

git submodule add

I got:

The following path is ignored by one of your .gitignore files: ...

I'm thinking that .gitignore(d) paths might be the cause.