Hugo submodule with PaperMod - error says to remove site from .gitmodules but it's not there

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#1

Can anyone please point me in the right direction with this?

Site worked 4 months ago; now trying to do an update and probably I’ve changed something incorrectly. Deploy fails and log says:
11:06:22 PM: Starting to prepare the repo for build
11:06:22 PM: No cached dependencies found. Cloning fresh repo
11:06:22 PM: git clone GitHub - craigfisk/priceandposition: Mixed business and tech blog in PaperMod theme on Hugo (gohugio.io).
11:06:22 PM: Preparing Git Reference refs/heads/main
11:06:23 PM: Error checking out submodules: fatal: No url found for submodule path ‘priceandposition’ in .gitmodules
11:06:23 PM: Creating deploy upload records
11:06:23 PM: Failing build: Failed to prepare repo
11:06:23 PM: Failed during stage ‘preparing repo’: Error checking out submodules: fatal: No url found for submodule path ‘priceandposition’ in .gitmodules
: exit status 128

But “priceandposition” is the name of the site and it is not in .gitmodules; PaperMod, which is a submodule, is, as seen here:
[submodule “themes/PaperMod”]
path = themes/PaperMod
url = git@github.com:adityatelange/hugo-PaperMod.git

So I’m confused.

On my development system, “git submodule status” shows:
1d2ecfedac9f97dfd24dbce47f3e24c7c6750e19 themes/PaperMod (v6.0-41-g1d2ecfed)

Also, I tried again from the development system, before running hugo, git add ., git commit, git push origin main, I did
git rm --cached priceandposition
which returned
rm ‘priceandposition’

which seems like it was removed from git cache.

#2

Solved the mystery of “error checking out submodules. No url found for submodule path ‘priceandposition’ in .gitmodules” which was actually not in .gitmodules. Solution was to do “git rm --cached themes/priceandposition” even though “priceandposition” was not in themes or in .gitmodules. See Issue with adding common code as git submodule: "already exists in the index" - Stack Overflow