Git submodule failure when building pages with Hugo

Question

I am trying to follow the steps on Deployment as described in the manual of Academic-Hugo. The goal is to upload the Hugo website to GitHub pages. However the following step fails and I have no clue what the issue could be:

$ git submodule add -f -b master https://github.com/<USERNAME>/<USERNAME>.github.io.git public
Reactivating local git directory for submodule 'public'.
fatal: 'origin/master' is not a commit and a branch 'master' cannot be created from it
Unable to checkout submodule 'public'

The .gitmodules file looks like this (not sure how relevant that is though...):

[submodule "themes/academic"]
    path = themes/academic
    url = https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic.git
[submodule "public"]
    path = public
    url = https://github.com/<USERNAME>/<USERNAME>.github.io.git
    branch = master

While <USERNAME> is my actual username of course. I am new to Hugo and github pages and would appreciate any pointers on how to resolve this or even where to look for the root of the issue.

Answer 1

I had the same issue. I tried to continue on anyway and it ended up working:

site $ hugo
site $ cd public/
site/public $ git add .
site/public $ git commit -m "initial build"
site/public $ git push # After this, all is well.

I did run a git status prior to pushing, but it had a warning (don't recall the message) and suggested I remove the remote origin. I ignored that too.

Answer 2

Had the same issue today and landed on this site that has some useful info about deleting modules and re-doing the whole thing from start. Hope it might be useful to others as well.