[git] No submodule mapping found in .gitmodule for a path that's not a submodule

I have a project that has a submodule at lib/three20

My .gitmodule file looks like this:

[submodule "lib/three20"]
    path = lib/three20
    url = git://github.com/facebook/three20.git

I have cloned this in the past without errors, (git submodule init followed by a git submodule update) and it's been working for a while.

I tried to clone this to a new machine, and now I'm getting this error on git submodule init:

No submodule mapping found in .gitmodules for path 'Classes/Support/Three20'

That path is just an empty folder in Xcode that I use to house the projects from the other directory. It's not part of the .gitmodules file, so I don't see where it's getting this path from.

Any ideas?

If you have:

• removed the submodule using a simple rm instead of git rm;
• removed the reference to the submodule in .gitmodules;
• removed the reference in .git/config;

And you're still getting the error, what solved it for me was readding back an empty folder, where the submodule used to be. You can do this with:

mkdir -p path/to/your/submodule
touch path/to/your/submodule/.keep

.keep is just an empty file. git commit it and the error should disappear.

After looking at my .gitmodules, it turned out I did have an uppercase letter where I should not have. So keep in mind, the .gitmodules directories are case sensitive

No submodule mapping found in .gitmodules for path 'OtherLibrary/MKStore' when

$ git submodule update --init

I didn't know why the error occur. After spending a minute and found the answer in stackoverflow.

$ git rm --cached OtherLibrary/MKStore

and then update the submodule again. It's working fine.

http://en.saturngod.net/no-submodule-mapping-found-in-gitmodules

Scenario: changing the submodule from directory dirA-xxx to another directory dirB-xxx

1. move the dirA-xxx to dirB-xxx
2. modify entry in .gitmodules to use dirB-xxx
3. modify entry in .git/config to use dirB-xxx
4. modify .git/modules/dirA-xxx/config to reflect the correct directory
5. modify dirA-xxx/.git to reflect the correct directory

6. run git submodule status

   if return error: No submodule mapping found in .gitmodules for path dirA-xxx. This is due to dirA-xxx is not existing, yet it is still tracked by git. Update the git index by: git rm --cached dirA-xxx

   Try with git submodule foreach git pull. I didn't go through the actual study of git submodule structure, so above steps may break something. Nonetheless going through above steps, things look good at the moment. If you have any insight or proper steps to get thing done, do share it here. :)

in the file .gitmodules, I replaced string

"path = thirdsrc\boost" 

with

"path = thirdsrc/boost", 

and it solved! - -

When I use SourceTree to do the stuff, it will spit out this message.
The message that I encountered:

git -c diff.mnemonicprefix=false -c core.quotepath=false -c credential.helper=sourcetree submodule update --init --recursive
No submodule mapping found in .gitmodules for path 'SampleProject/SampleProject'
Completed with errors, see above

My scenario is I misapplied the project directory the contains .git folder.
SourceTree regarded this folder as git submodule, but actually not.

My solution is use command line to remove it.

$ git rm -r SampleProject --cached
$ git commit -m "clean up folders"

remove the garbage in git and keep it clean.

Just had this problem. For a while I tried the advice about removing the path, git removing the path, removing .gitmodules, removing the entry from .git/config, adding the submodule back, then committing and pushing the change. It was puzzling because it looked like no change when I did "git commit -a" so I tried pushing just the removal, then pushing the readdition to make it look like a change.

After a while I noticed by accident that after removing everything, if I ran "git submodule update --init", it had a message about a specific name that git should no longer have had any reference to: the name of the repository the submodule was linking to, not the path name it was checking it out to. Grepping revealed that this reference was in .git/index. So I ran "git rm --cached repo-name" and then readded the module. When I committed this time, the commit message included a change that it was deleting this unexpected object. After that it works fine.

Not sure what happened, I'm guessing someone misused the git submodule command, maybe reversing the arguments. Could have been me even... Hope this helps someone!

Just git rm subdir will be ok. that will remove the subdir as an index.

In my case the error was probably due to an incorrect merge between .gitmodules on two branches with different submodules configurations. After taking suggestions from this forum, I solved the problem editing manually the .gitmodules file, adding the missing submodule entry is pretty easy. After that, the command git submodule update --init --recursive worked with no issues.

I resolved this issue for me. Initially I tried to do this:

git submodule add --branch master [URL] [PATH_TO_SUBMODULE]

As it turns out the specification of the --branch option should not be used if you want to clone the master branch. It throws this error:

fatal: Cannot force update the current branch.
Unable to checkout submodule '[PATH_TO_SUBMODULE]'

Every time you try to do a

git submodule sync

This error will be thrown:

No submodule mapping found in .gitmodules for path '[PATH_TO_SUBMODULE]'

And the lines needed in .gitmodules are never added.

So the solution for me was this:

git submodule add [URL] [PATH_TO_SUBMODULE]

I just hit this error after trying to "git submodule init" on a new checkout of my repo. Turns out I had specified the module sub-folder with the wrong case initially. Since I'm on a Mac with a case-sensitive filesystem (hurr) it was failing. For example:

git submodule add [email protected]:user/project.git MyApp/Resources/Project
Cloning into 'MyApp/Resources/Project'

succeeds but the trouble is that on disk the path is

Myapp/Resources/Project

What I don't understand is why git is init'ing the module to wrong folder (ignoring the incorrect case in my command) but then operating correctly (by failing) with subsequent commands.

Usually, git creates a hidden directory in project's root directory (.git/)

When you're working on a CMS, its possible you install modules/plugins carrying .git/ directory with git's metadata for the specific module/plugin

Quickest solution is to find all .git directories and keep only your root git metadata directory. If you do so, git will not consider those modules as project submodules.

The problem for us was that duplicate submodule entries had been added into .gitmodules (probably from a merge). We searched for the path git complained about in .gitmodules and found the two identical sections. Deleting one of the sections solved the problem for us.

For what it is worth, git 1.7.1 gave the "no submodule mapping" error but git 2.13.0 didn't seem to care.

The folder mapping can be found in .git/modules folder (each has config file with reference to its worktree), so make sure these folders correspond to the configuration in .gitmodules and .git/config.

So .gitmodules has the correct path:

[submodule "<path>"]
  path = <path>
  url = [email protected]:foo/bar.git

and in .git/modules/<path>/config in [core] section you've the right path to your <path>, e.g.

[core]
  repositoryformatversion = 0
  filemode = true
  bare = false
  logallrefupdates = true
  worktree = ../../../<path>

If the right folder in .git/modules is missing, then you've to go to your submodule dir and try git reset HEAD --hard or git checkout master -f. If this won't help, you probably want to remove all the references to the broken submodule and add it again, then see: Rename a git submodule.