SourceTree says 'No url found for submodule path'

[Cliff Spencer]

Every time I pull from github I see this

git -c diff.mnemonicprefix=false -c core.quotepath=false -c credential.helper=sourcetree submodule update --init

fatal: No url found for submodule path 'APP NAME' in .gitmodules

Completed with errors, see above

This started happening suddenly. The project has no submodules. This doesn't occur with command-line git, only with source tree. I'm on version 2.6.1 on MacOS 10.12.6

How do I resolve this error?

[Ana Retamal]

Hi Cliff, looks like you might have some .gitmodules directory somewhere within your repo. If you have no submodules, delete .gitmodules, and any references to submodules in .git/config.

I also found a couple of posts where users seem to have a similar issue, you can check their responses at No submodule mapping found in gitmodule for a path that's not a submodule and No submodule mapping found in gitmodules for path.

Let us know if that helped you!

Cheers,

Ana

[Cliff Spencer]

Hi Ana, thanks for your reply. I should have mentioned that there is no .gitmodules folder present within .git nor any references to submodules within .git/config

I checked with the following commands:

bash-3.2$ cd .git

bash-3.2$ find . |grep odules

bash-3.2$ grep -i odules config

I'm curious that this only happens when using SourceTree and not when using the command-line tools.

[Cliff Spencer]

Update: I found this!

bash-3.2$ git ls-files --stage | grep 160000

160000 b06580880c5eaf8b1564f74c30d595bc6a363a13 0 APPNAME

I performed 

bash-3.2$ git rm --cached APPNAME and the error was fixed. 

[Francis Paquin-Brien]

Cliff's solution worked for me too. Thanks Cliff!

[mikestafford]

I had this same problem -- it showed up suddenly, and I have no submodules (and no .gitmodules). Cliff's solution above did not work for me.

I found that (somehow) one of our developers had created and checked-in an empty folder in the root of the repo that shared the same name as the repo itself. ie, my repo is named "ISTE" and, somehow I ended up with the empty folder blah/ISTE/ISTE/ 

Git appeared to be interpreting that folder as a reference to the repo, creating some kind of recursive loop. Again, I have no idea how that folder was created, so I don't know how git was mislead... 

But, removing that folder from git resolved the issue for me. (To be specific, I first added a dummy file to the folder so that git would recognize an edit, and changed the name of the folder to try to decouple the weirdness; I committed and pushed those changes, then deleted the folder and dummy file and committed & pushed again. All was well after that.)

YMMV...