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 = git://github.com/eykd/django-static-management.git
[submodule "external/pyfacebook"]
        path = external/pyfacebook
        url = http://github.com/sciyoshi/pyfacebook.git

However, .git/config only contains the first:

[submodule "src/static_management"]
        url = git://github.com/eykd/django-static-management.git

The second submodule (external/pyfacebook) was added by another developer in a feature branch. I've inherited the development now, and have checked out the feature branch. However, Git will not pull the submodule for me. I've tried:

• git submodule init
• git submodule update
• git submodule update --init
• git submodule sync
• Removing all submodule definitions from .git/config and running git submodule init. It only copies over the previously existing submodule and ignores the new one.
• Entering new submodule definitions in .git/config manually and running git submodule update. Only the previously existing submodules bother to update.

in various combinations, but git simply will not update .git/config based on the new contents of .gitmodules, nor will it create the external/pyfacebook folder and pull the submodule's contents.

What am I missing? Is manual intervention (adding a submodule entry by hand to .git/config) truly required, and why?

Edit: Manual intervention does not work. Manually adding the new submodule entry to .git/config doesn't do a thing. The new submodule is ignored.

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 ).