Git will not init/sync/update new submodules

Question

Here\'s part of the contents of my .gitmodules file:

[submodule \"src/static_management\"]
        path = src/static_management
        url = gi         


        

Answer 1

I had this same problem - it turned out that the .gitmodules file was committed, but the actual submodule commit (i.e. the record of the submodule's commit ID) wasn't.

Adding it manually seemed to do the trick - e.g.:

git submodule add http://github.com/sciyoshi/pyfacebook.git external/pyfacebook

(Even without removing anything from .git/config or .gitmodules.)

Then commit it to record the ID properly.

Adding some further comments to this working answer: If the git submodule init or git submodule update does'nt work, then as described above git submodule add url should do the trick. One can cross check this by

 git config --list

and one should get an entry of the submodule you want to pull in the result of the git config --list command. If there is an entry of your submodule in the config result, then now the usual git submodule update --init should pull your submodule. To test this step, you can manually rename the submodule and then updating the submodule.

 mv yourmodulename yourmodulename-temp
 git submodule update --init

To find out if you have local changes in the submodule, it can be seen via git status -u ( if you want to see changes in the submodule ) or git status --ignore-submodules ( if you dont want to see the changes in the submodule ).