Question

I am fairly new to Git and trying my best to find some documentation on this problem to no avail.

Here’s my command:

$ git submodule add https://github.com/joliver/EventStore.git externalsource/JOliverEventStore/ 

fatal: Not a git repository: ../.git/modules/externalsource/JOliverEventStore
Unable to checkout submodule ‘externalsource/JOliverEventStore’

I am in my root of my repo and there is currently no directory for /externalsource/JO
liverEventStore/. The error is talking about a directory that I have no knowledge of.

If I add the submodule to the root dir like this:

$ git submodule add https://github.com/joliver/EventStore.git JOliverEventStore 

I have no problem and it creates the folder in the root directory.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It can depends on the version of Git you are using: this recent thread (February 2012) mentions a bug:

Since recently a submodule with name <name> has its git directory in the .git/modules/<name> directory of the superproject while the work tree contains a gitfile pointing there.

When the same submodule is added on a branch where it wasn’t present so far (it is not found in the .gitmodules file), the name is not initialized from the path as it should.
This leads to a wrong path entered in the gitfile when the .git/modules/<name> directory is found, as this happily uses the – now empty – name.
It then always points only a single directory up, even if we have a path deeper in the directory hierarchy.

But more generally, uses the <path> argument of git submodule:

<path> is the relative location for the cloned submodule to exist in the superproject.

• If <path> does not exist, then the submodule is created by cloning from the named URL.
• If <path> does exist and is already a valid git repository, then this is added to the changeset without cloning.
  This second form is provided to ease creating a new submodule from scratch, and presumes the user will later push the submodule to the given URL.

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eoinoc mentions in the comments another cause, which is detailed in the question “git status returns fatal: Not a git repository but .git exists and HEAD has proper permissions“.

My repo’s location had changed, and I needed to update git’s configuration files.