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 ).